Slippery

slippery was the last of it's kind. the future held new things. anything could have happened.

06/20  1 pm

With nothing to do we stumble up the dusty road, mumbling, throwing crooked thumbs at passing trucks. The sun breaks loose. Someone pulls over and we scramble into the bed, crouching between trash.

Dropped at the gas station, we walk to the mart and Benny prowls its dim and narrow aisles for warm socks while I sit on the deck outside and pipe the harp. The shop is attached to a semi-abandoned waterfront warehouse---ribbed metal, blue walls, red roof, and green over the windows, all seeping rust. Good afternoon, blues.

Outside the liquor store a bearded man with vodka breath tells me I look weathered. He says Naknek cops are crazy and tells me about a cokehead vandalizing his boat. After Benny buys a sixpack we march down to the beach to watch fishing boats float by.

That evening we return to town once more, this time in a small yellow car with a methwoman driver, her friend being fondled by a fellow hitcher. We end up at Red Dog and the girls want us to buy them drinks in exchange for the lift, but instead we sneak out and head to the library. At Fisherman Joe's, an Inuit offers to buy us drinks but then pukes in the urinal and disappears.

Stepping outside at midnight from a dark bar into broad daylight is disorienting.

06/22  21:00

We ride to town in the greenhouse of a truck canopy with two men in black, one brown-skinned and in shorts and sunglasses and a shirt that says FORGET HELL, the older one white and grey and fat. The older guy talks about putting a new window in his boat, Benny asks if they're heading out soon, he replies "You have to know when to hold and when to fold as the saying goes---got to be soon though, I can't afford to live here and not make money." He talks about living on peanut butter, the younger guy mentions scraping off the mold when it goes bad.

06/24  14:00

Outside Fisherman Joe's I purchase from a black man a tenth of rum. He smuggles alcohol up from the lower 48 to help out people unaccustomed to Alaska's steep prices. I bought his last bottle.

We see a rusty yellow station wagon with a grey set of moose antlers mounted to its face.

06/26  10:00

During my first trip to the showers I find one that doesn't work and get trapped in the stall. The door won't open, it's stuck shut, it won't budge, I can't get out---I panic, become ready to pound with fists and shout for help, then the door jerks open with a yank and I almost fall on my ass.

The property, according to a fisher on Charisma, was once a boatyard. This aspect still visibly remains---floating vessels propped on blocks, train cars scattered for storage, cranes lifting boxes, weathered cars, vans, trucks surrounding work areas---but a fish processing facility now sits above on the hill overlooking the bay, and we the processors have been stored beside wood pallets, stacked up in the marina barn.

That night at about midnight Benny and I head to our usual drinking spot and drink whiskey around a campfire with guys from South Africa and Jamaica. I play harmonica and the sky actually starts to darken for the first time while I've been here---darkness almost entirely envelops the sky, exuding a certain calm into the air as the sun swoops low to bounce off the horizon.

  

06/27  05:00

Is today the 28th or the 27th?

Struck by slippery sleeplessness, I venture forth into the brief Alaskan night. Time moves more slowly here, up near a pole, far from the equator; each day blurs into the next, hours are more vague than down below, minutes creep across your nose, seconds drip from the faucet, and any moment could be one you've lived before or have to live yet---is it Tuesday already?---until it's gone and you can't live it again... then the drippy darkness slips away into grey looming light, faint, distant, a mere hint of sun and day, a wet and droopy blue, and night dap-dippery slides out from beneath you like a chair you mean to sit on, it's pulled away and you're left with nothing but coffee and tea and a sixteen-hour shift.

Every two days feel like one, a long stretch of time interspersed with a few naps, a dragging moment, unending, a loop, a pause, frozen, still, drippery slip, a broken clock.

This afternoon I dream my grandfather has died, and I awaken unsure whether he is alive.

06/27  20:00

The main, crucial difference between a night of sleep or of insomnia is the moment you wake up; with the former, there's the sudden shock, a cold bite, or sometimes it's more gradual, but it's always a moment of initial confusion, of having to remember oneself; however with the latter, there is no such confusion, just a strange point when the attempt to become asleep shifts into an attempt to become awake, and the difference lies inherently in this decision (besides the reduced number of sleep hours), because eventually you realize it's futile and you've got to give up and get up and drink some coffee, and even though you know you need, in this case, as much sleep as possible, you also know you could be doing something else right now, like reading, writing, getting ready for the day. So you pull on your long underwear.

06/30

The 24-hour shift system is interesting and effective at keeping the machine running at full capacity, perpetually; as the machine's human components we are the parts that need rest, while the other working parts are wholly unresting. So the staff body is split into three interchangeable shifts, two of which are at work while the third sleeps, recharges. The shift who's been working longest is relieved by the shift who's been sleeping, so each shift works together at some point. When your shift is done, you have eight hours until you work again, until you wake up and have to get ready for another sixteen hours. You come in and literally take someone's tool and continue their work so they can leave without stopping production---the only time anything stops is during meals, which happen every six hours at 5:30 and 11:30.

07/05 or 06

Each day is the same, every moment a repetition of the last. I go to bed, sleep, and wake up the day before, always chasing tomorrow but stuck in a vortex, the end of the week far beyond reach, forgotten, obscured, a dream loop of actions performed from a distance, behind a wall, by a different person, another me, a broken reflection of myself living another life, existing in another dimension. Some lengths of time, long hours, pass in moments (wait, this is already our second meal?) while others, mere minutes, stretch on, reverse, repeat, reduce speed, never seem to end---time moves so slowly it begins to decelerate, its rate of passing decreases so much that it begins traveling at a negative speed, and you look up and can actually see the clock's hands moving backward then slowly forward again.

It becomes a swirl of languages, accents, drama, stress, sex, drugs, food, fish. There are people from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, Ohio, Wisconsin, then on further out through the world, people from China, Ukraine, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Philippines, Mexico, all shouting different sounds but not saying anything, really just giving commands, exchanging rote verbalizations. Music is almost always playing in fillet, but rarely anything you actually want to hear. You make friends where you can, like Benny Scott John and Zach from before shifts began, new people you pick up along the way or old acquaintances from past lifes, or Red Ben Oscar Linda Dave and Alano the fillet supervisors, or that crazy guy trying to load as many fish as fast as possible who sent salmon through the fillet splitter machine so quickly the computer counter couldn't keep up, or especially old Japanese blade master Winston---yes, Winston!, the sharpener of knives, the sensei to us cutters, the only person who really seemed to have our back in our impossible mission to cut the perfect fillet twenty five times a minute---but really you just stand there, stand still in one place for up to three hours at a time, vaguely moving your hands across an ambiguous mass of dead flesh, trying to make conversation to keep your mind off the clock's backwards spinning hands.

So then you cut after lunch, and when you step outside with your sunglasses on, see the soft clouds over the smooth bay, that is the best moment of the trip.

06/18  06:00

From behind the veil of sleep debt, everything is distant, unreal. How did I get here? Where was I before? When did today turn to tomorrow? Who is driving?

Sometimes, the only people you know have no idea who you are. Memories are invented or replaced, your face swapped with someone else's.

Sometimes, everyone looks familiar. Do I know him from somewhere? Have I seen her before? Or did I only dream it?

Eventually, people you don't know seem the most recognizable.

As clouds engulf the window then drop away, the world gets a little smaller. You can watch the ground visibly shrink during take-off, but when you break through a layer of clouds the world completely vanishes from sight. It seems less important when it's not there.

We're in an extended flying hearse, a tin can with wings. What happens next? The dream drags on, the veil remains in place.

The sun setting on a horizon of clouds is reminiscent of sunlight falling across the bushy tops of trees, or across waves of sand dunes; or, perhaps most closely, it is like sun touching bumpy, powdery hills of snow.

Eventually, everything reminds you of something else.

Then you wake up and there people around you, shuffling their things; you can't remember going to sleep, you don't know where you are, and all you want is a couple cold beers and a warm shower. You return to grey sky and wet ground.

But you remember, it's always sunny above the clouds.

07/07  16:00

Alaska, I suppose, is made up mostly of two parts which I see epitomized here before me now: the lusty green marshy part, the grass and trees and wildlife sprouting about, untouched wonderland, alive and thriving wonderful; but also the ugly grey and muddy part, the garbage and factories and people taking hold, enveloping smog, hard and dying grittiness. This is true of many places, if not all of them, but here there's a hint of indifferent intermingling, the two parts existing together as a whole, the rusty boats pulling fish from water, the grey shacks sinking into woods. A symbiosis.

Then we come, the outsiders, helping or hindering the process, reshaping the salmon, swatting at insects, leaving our empty bottles, cigarette butts. Intruders, not fully welcome in either the green or grey part.

The sun and clouds recognize us, however. I sit and listen with the sky to the gulls' moans.

07/10  16:00

A terrible stench is seeping up from the bay, a smell of watery decay, of rotten fishiness; a scent not unlike that which lingers in the production facility, which climbs up from the floor beneath the work area, from the swamp of salmon scraps. It's time to leave soon, before the ocean swallows us, before the rot consumes us.

Rumor is, sixteens end tomorrow. What then? What will they do with us? Who will they keep, and who will they discard?

Has it really been two weeks? Independence Day seems only a day or two ago. Soon enough, I'll wake up and another week will be gone. But what happens next?

07/12  16:00

Our time here nears its end. Home---when every place is the same as the last, home is wherever you find the most comfortable bed.

The blanket of clouds still reminds me I am safe. In the sand of the beach I find paw prints, huge bear paws, about eight inches around, big round toes with five dots from the nails.

Back in the room, Scott is in bed with Helena, the Mormon, watching some movie on a tiny laptop screen. I eat a Snickers and put in earplugs.

07/14  14:00

After our streak of sixteen sixteens, during the first shortened shift I and Andy agree a trek to "the bar" is the best idea. We make jokes about lines of cocaine on the conveyor belts---"I've got a lot of money to blow, or rather FOR blow; then after a week I'll be back to sucking dick"---and decide to meet at Red Dog.

I stop to check with Benny but he is going to bed. On the road I find a ride, turns out to be the plant general manager, who picks up three other hikers, all of whom I recognize from fillet and one of which happens to be Andy.

We go to the library to use the internet. While waiting for my turn I find a book called "A Hell of a Way to Lose a Cow," a hitch-hiking memoir by some NPR guy about emigrating from the UK to the US.

We head to the Red Dog. My first beer in a while, a five dollar PBR, is satisfying. Even television, which I generally hate, is strangely satiating. Then we head to Fisherman Joe's. We drink. We roll around town. Eventually Andy and I hitch back. I play blues harp in the bed of the pickup, my hair lashing in the wind.

I make my way up to Andy's room where we drink from our bottles of whiskey. However, when I get back to my room, my wallet is gone. I check Andy's room. I check the bathroom. It is gone. I talk to people, I make calls, I cancel cards. I won't be able to fly home if I don't have ID. Suddenly, after feeling so free, that the world is open and untamed, it all closes back up and I find myself literally stranded.

The next day we barely work. The lines are slowed to less than quarter speed and most of the time we are cleaning. There is not likely a funnier image held in my mind than that of little Asia lady Linda screaming bloody murder in her high, shrieking voice, while spraying uncontrollably with a water hose. I am the only one who thinks it is funny.

Lists are being posted of who's flying out when. Scott, Benny and I are all leaving the same day, July seventeenth, 7-17, my lucky numbers, and I feel good. But what about the ID?

At the end of my last run of work a girl I knew in the dorm yells at me accusingly in her best you're-in-so-much-trouble voice that I'm to be seen in the office, but I'm totally excited and happy because I'm quite certain someone's brought back my wallet, and I'm right. A good samaritan delivered it unaltered. I'll be leaving on seven-seventeen.

So we get drunk. John gets out his stashed half gallon of cheap vodka. The length of time between the moment I get my wallet back and waking up on the day we fly out will be hard to remember. We go to town to drink on the beach. A local fisherman lady asks us to tell her a story---we have nothing to tell but engage in light conversation, someone mentions the difficulty in being so far away, the fisher lady says, "Naknek ain't far away, it's the center of everything; everywhere else is far away from here." We are sufficiently weirded out and not sufficiently intoxicated. "Ah," says John, "need to keep drinking." At some point we are back at camp and decide to terrorize the Mormons. My last memory is of stepping out from the Mormon stronghold into the windswept alley, glancing around for John, and finally seeing him poking his head and a vodka bottle out from behind a shed with the biggest, dumbest grin on his face that I've ever seen on anybody. We take pulls behind the shed and I black out.

I wake up around midnight and when I go out to get some hydration I find everyone back to work. It is a brief but horrible dream in which I am a ghost that everyone sees floating around watching them toil. I go back to bed.

The next day I find that Benny's given a hickey to Helena the Mormon, that one of the two women in camp I've been interested in was in our room while I was blacked out and trying to sleep, that my guitarist singer friend Mandy who's at my old college fucked at least nine different guys over the course of three weeks, and that Benny will be touring Washington with me once we get out of Alaska. I have no idea that I'll have to sleep in the van, that the Naknek airport is possibly the worst in all of the United States, that in a couple hours I'll be sneaking rum into a Coke in an Anchorage airport restaurant, that in a couple weeks I'll be driving my shitty two-door car filled with four people down to Nevada for a Vegas wedding, that on the way back from Nevada I'll be cuffed in the backseat of a police car, that I'll spend up all my money from Alaska on booze and bad food, that I'll sink into weed depression with weed that isn't mine, that I'll almost join the US Navy, that I'll suddenly get on I-5 and show up at a friend's doorstep in Bellingham at one in the morning---all I know is that I'm awake, alive, sober, free, and ready for tomorrow, wherever I may awaken.