You’re Never too Tough to Call Your Mamma

There were two payphones on each side of Kodiak Harbor. One was in front of the oldest licensed bar in Kodiak, the B and B. The other, was in front of Tony’s Bar, a former strip club that was forced to give up its nude dancers after too many fishermen fell in love with the same woman, then killed each other to settle it.

The payphone’s close proximity to these esteemed establishments made it difficult to find one that worked. The receivers were usually cracked, cords were cut, and gum was stuck in the coin slots. If I did find one that worked, it might be splattered with puke. I usually chose the one by Tony’s because if it was busted, I could walk a little further into town to use the phone beside the liquor store.

One night (the sun was still up) I lifted the receiver and wiped away a thin layer of make-up leftover from the last caller’s cheek. Her perfume wasn’t going anywhere. As I started punching in the numbers a guy stumbling down the sidewalk kicked over a newspaper stand. Then, he turned towards the brick wall and kicked it three times. When he saw me, he smiled.

“I bet you think you’re a fisherman,” he said.

I was a deckhand aboard the Susan Marie, a 47-foot-long purse seiner docked in Kodiak Harbor. She was white with red and blue trim. The captain, Danny Gilbert, was a screamer. During his forty-year fishing career, he’d forgotten how to speak like a regular human. In harbor, crews of other boats could hear him barking orders at me clear across the water.

“Pick that shit up!…Not that shit, the other shit! Don’t you know what shit is?!”

A lot of guys wouldn’t work for him, but I was new and didn’t know any better. Besides, there were definite perks to being his deckhand. Danny always caught fish and, our boat had a toilet. Men on board the other boats had to share a bucket with a long rope tied to the handle. Before going, they would throw it over the side and fill the bottom with a little water and take it to a private corner on the open deck to squat. When we were in town I asked a guy what it was like to have to shit in a bucket. He said you got used to it. It only bothered him when it rained.

 It always rained. This was Alaska.    

Kodiak is a small town, but it’s even smaller for a fisherman. If he has money, he can get drunk at one of the two bars. If he’s broke, which most are, he can go to the library. The man to woman ratio is about what you would find in prison. All over town, packs of men wearing hoodies and rubber boots roam in search of entertainment. It’s impossible to go unnoticed. Eventually somebody is going to want to “talk.”

One day, after I’d only been in town a few weeks, I was drawn into a circle by a guy everyone called Okie. Standing in the center, he danced with an American flag that was six inches tall. Each man stood at attention, throwing up a loose salute as the tiny colors passed. When Okie noticed me with my hands in my pockets he stumbled over. He gripped the flag’s short wooden handle like a samurai sword and pointed the gold painted tip towards my right eye. “Where do you want it?” he asked.  

As Okie leaned in, I tilted back on my heels. His friend Sean, a guy who had a habit of throwing empty glass bottles into the air, broke the spell. “Okie you stupid son of a b—“, he grabbed Okie from behind and pulled him back to the center of the circle. It was not an act pure kindness. This was Sean’s way of buying me a round, which meant the next one was on me. But it was a debt I’d never have to repay because while I was out fishing Sean fell off a bridge. The talk at the B and B said he’d broke his back. He was airlifted off the island.

The year was 2006; an even year. Danny told me when I first arrived that odd years were always better. During June and July we scratched up and down the coast; blindly setting our seine along tide streaks and hauling in loads of salmon a few hundred pounds at a time. After sixty days of fighting off Danny’s insults and wiping red-hot jelly fish that dripped into our eyes, we’d each only brought in about 2,000 bucks. That worked out to be a little over two dollars per hour.

It wasn’t until August, when the pinks started to run that we began to make any money. By then, my hair was long, and my beard hung down past my front collar. Halfway through the day I’d find a dried cheerio hung in the hair beneath my chin. If one of my crewmembers was looking, I made sure to eat it. All fishermen are crazy. To survive they’ve got to believe you’re crazy too. Even when it came to the guys I worked and lived with every day; I couldn’t give an inch.  

For three weeks we fished hard. By the end of that leg of the trip, I’d made 14,000 dollars. We came to town to offload at the cannery and Danny went shopping for groceries. I jogged up to my usual pay phone to make a call. That’s when the drunk kicked the wall.

“You think you’re a fisherman,” he leaned towards me from three feet away, but there he stopped. He didn’t dare come any closer. Maybe he noticed the dried blood splattered on my clothes. Or he’d caught a whiff of what a man smells like after fourteen days without a shower. Or maybe it was the way I gripped the phone receiver, ready to bust it open across his nose.  

The drunk kicked the wall again and laughed. He turned both of his middle fingers in the air and stumbled back from the way he’d come. As he turned the corner, I heard him yell at someone else down the street, “Hey! Hey you!”

I pulled out my calling card and punched in the numbers. It was three am in Alabama.

“Boy,” my dad answered. “You had one more day and your Mamma was calling the coast guard to go looking for you.”

There was no one else on the sidewalk, but I turned to face the brick wall and spoke in a quiet voice. “Dad, you can’t let her do that, I’m a fisherman.”

Mamma got on the phone then, “I don’t care what you are you better find a way to call me!”

I dropped my head and imagined a helicopter hovering over our boat. The message reverberating clear across the water to the ears of men squatting over buckets, to men threatening men with tiny flags, to men kicking newspaper stands; “BEN THOMPSON! CALL YOUR MOTHER! SHES WORRIED ABOUT YOU!”

Alaska may have taught me how to act tough, but I knew that no amount of tough could ever beat a mother’s worry. There was only one thing I could do.

“I’m sorry mamma. I promise to call you. “I leaned closer to the wall and lowered my voice a little more, “Just…please…please, don’t embarrass me in front of my friends.”