Shift Colors
Ding ding! “Underway...shift colors.”
The boatswain's pipe blows— one long distended howl and an abbreviated chirp.
“Shipmates, this is the Captain speaking. Operation Southern Watch over Iraq has been cut short for us— we have been ordered back to the Adriatic Sea to be ready to support NATO Operation Joint Endeavor. We will serve as command and control platform for all maritime aviation in the region, during the early moments of the peace implementation operation, as boots on the ground move in. This is the largest peace-keeping operation since World War Two. The first moments will be the deciding factor in the success of our peace-keeping mission. We must steam all ahead full in order to be on station, on time. We're going to do it in Big Dawg fashion… As peace-keeping forces from around the world move and begin to pour into the region, America and Air Wing One will already be patrolling the skies above Bosnia, Hornets and Tomcats away. Make the ship ready.”
December...1995
Straits of Hormuz
Back out to sea. Haze gray. An actuating cylinder blew on a hydraulic door down on the seventh deck of lower stage five. We were doing a routine inspection of all the doors and hatches, regular monthly PMS (preventive maintenance system). I was with Petty Officer Barlow. All the way down to the seventh deck— checking doors as we went— Barlow bled crimson words from his mouth, lisping, mumbling, smirking, unreeling foul talk about niggers niggers niggers lazy niggers and all the things he thought I should know about the South and everything he presumed about the North and New York City and Turkeys— what they eat, and how they walk, the way they eat and shit in the same place and how the walls of the coop are splattered half-way up with scratched dung and their blank eyes follow you with a cheerful stare. Antibiotics. Hormones. Factory-farming. The vast coop pulsing with enormous gobbledygook flowing away vacant and hollow over fallow golden fields. The endless chatter and shit— a foul odor that forks the air, he said. My daddy would never have a black. Used to be all the hands were black but my daddy won't bring them on the farm. They never on time, he said; they got colored peoples’ time, he said, and they shifty, sleepy, lazy, sneaking around, trouble— nuthin' but trouble you hire black. Turn your back for a second, one'll steal away with your birds, a fitful gobbler under each arm, in his big hands like suctioning black starfish. His bottom lip swollen with bitterness and Copenhagen and muttering when he said it, hand over hand into the hole, un-dogging each hinged water-tight hatch, raising up each vertical sliding and rolling elevator door, manually, using the Allen-wrenches in the manifolds, the blue boxes clustered under the control panels close to the deck. I nodded. He wanted me to know he does not like working with blacks.
​
The door shuddered and sputtered, hissing, but it didn't raise up. It is a large vertical sliding door. It knocked and hammered like there was air in the pipes. This in 169. So we rang up Chonko on the second-deck manning the phones, Baird and Carson in 179, opening and closing doors on the other side of the shaft, the trunk, in the other service mag. Baird and Carson confirmed that there was a ruptured cylinder-gland and oil was leaking all over the deck. It will have to be replaced, Barlow said. We climbed back up to the second deck and went back to the shop. We went back to get rags and tools and blacks. 'Well, I don't know,' he said, 'sometimes I do like blacks working for me,' he smirked, swollen lip curled. 'Ya know I like to make 'em sweat. They smack their lips and swear. They chirp and flutter fitfully like my daddy's turkeys. Proud. Stubborn. Dumb. Muscles gorged and swollen pumped up on hormones and juice. It's fun for a while, but they don't ever do it right the first time, so in the end you got to do it yourself. They just Nigger rig it.'
​
I don't know much about that. I kept silent. I'm not very good at mechanical things: If I did the job, he would probably have to do it again. It would be all fucked up. Slater rigged.
​
We got some blacks, some monkey wrenches, and a bail of rags to soak up the oil, and met Baird, Carson, and Chonko on the seventh deck in 179. It had a vertical rolling door and we tagged it open—we hung a red tag on the manifold and the run-stop switch, one in the machinery room, one on the main-deck control station and the second-deck control station, and one on the door, signed by a First-Class electrician in the shop. We powered down the elevator and pinned open the door. And then we climbed onto the platform that waited for us that we had jogged down to the seventh deck. On a hydraulic door, the cylinders are filled with oil pressurized at 4,500psi. The oil rises in the cylinder under all this pressure and pushes up the smaller cylinder inside of it, forcing the door to rise or swing open— a little like a hatchback on a car. Pneumatic cylinders and hydraulic cylinders work under the same principle, except oil is denser and therefore can exert more pressure and more force. Heavy doors require more pressure, more force. That's why the big upper stage elevator hatches in the hangar and on the flightdeck use oil. This is how I understand it anyway. My mechanical knowledge of these things is limited to what I see and what they tell me. In the past, I just pressed my thumb to the send button and the platform was launched or called out of stow. I pushed open or close and the door unpinned, un-dogged, clank, clunk, clank, clunk, hiss and the door jolted and shimmied up or down and locked into place. The pneumatic loading ramps clanked and descended silently or ascended and shook back into a locked position.
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There were three black guys working with us. Their names are not important. None of this is. I just ramble on. Why do I do that? Everything I write is so mundane. Tedious and mundane. My life. My diary. Is there even a point to any of this? I wake up. I am late for muster. I drink 24 ounces of coffee and crawl into a hole. I sweep the trunk and wire-brush the ladder. I clean missiles. I move missiles. I push them on and off the elevator platform and chain them to the tie-down fittings on the platform. I reconfigure a skid. I unload a gun-barrel. I smoke. I smoke some more. I shit. I spit in my hand and fuck it, surrounded by a brown enormous odor. I sleep on the cold deck down in my hole, down in 5-79. I watch Bucklewood, Gridley, Powers, Futch, and Coceres wrestle down in the hole, tumbling over the dunnage. Farm boys. I watch a movie in the lounge hiding in the dark. Today, I chalked a dark lifer with vacant eyes in serpent coils of smoke on the catwalk. He was sat in the tarry corner and I was squatting and sketching and he stared at me with a bitter dark twitch, writhing hand covering his mouth. I hung over the bulwark and let my cigarette slowly burn away between my fingers, staring into the deep dark. I could hear the sea sliding by, tumbling against the hull. I watched a pair of structural mechanics work on the landing gear of an F-14. I ate sliders and fries on the forward messdecks. I ate soggy French toast and scrambled eggs on the aft messdecks. And two unfrozen sausage links. I breathed in chemicals and formaldehyde on the catwalk, the collar of my cold-weather coat turned up against the blustery wind and jeweled spray. The sea went from black to midnight and flowed over the edge. The Earth did somersaults and plunged into the sun, brassy light shimmering on the horizon burning slowly into the sky like paper, smoldering, glowing, flickering, spreading, reeling out over the waves inhaling the dark bleeding into the black. The sun was a flat golden plate, vague and gaseous.
​
I went to G-4 shop. I climbed into 169 with Petty Officer Barlow. I went to G-4 shop. Petty officer Barlow said ‘come on, got a niggur in the wood pile.’ I climbed into 169 with Barlow. Petty Officer Harris said that Barlow could talk a wart off a dingle. Harris and Barlow were good ole’boys from the more southern parts of North Carolina. Charlotte and Fayetteville or something like that. We discovered the blown cylinder gland. We climbed to the second deck, tracked forward, and climbed to the 01 level and reported the malfunction, gathered rags, tools and blacks, and tagged out the elevator, acquiring the needed electrician-signatures, and then we went back down through the hangar, crossed hangar bay One and Two between aircraft undergoing intermediate maintenance in a crimson haze and descended to the second deck. We called the elevator out of stow and sent it below with all our tools and rags and materials. We scuttled into the hole and plunged hand over hand until we reached the seventh deck bringing the blacks in our wake.
​
I have no idea what we did. It wasn't hard for them to take the old cylinder out but it proved difficult to repair the gland. Soused in pink oil we took turns clinging to the hinges, pipes, and counterweights in the corner bent like gymnasts, pulling, pushing, and twisting threads soaked in sticky oil. It glazed the bulkheads, the door hinges, the pipes, the shinning cylinder and white skin. The blacks did very little. They were clowns. I watched them swagger and step, rhyming, dancing, humming, rapping. A tall reedy black guy sat on the edge of an angle iron in the corner of the shaft, his dungaree shirt off— white T-shirt clinging to his sinewy shiny black skin. He hung his head, mumbling to himself, nodding, absurd cartoonish black lips protruding and paramount on his face, the bottom lip sticking out further from the top and rolling over like surf, too many buck white teeth distended from the grinning slash on his face. His black enormous white eyes gleaming shifted back and forth staring, moving man to man, tallying, assessing, musing, reporting, probing in the dark, shifting like a giant gecko after a fly, muttering, deep in private discussion with himself. He was wringing his hands. He worked out. He was strong, built, but disproportionate. His pecs huge, swollen. But he had no shoulders, no back. His arms chiseled but narrow, long and loping. He mumbled, shaking his tiny head too small for his broad torso, muttering, bobbing back and forth, swaying, referring to himself in the third-person, 'Daniels know...' shaking his head, 'Daniels be...’ His potholed lips so big that he talks opposite of clear. And his lips barely part whenever he talks. And his throttled bunged voice comes out of his throat, his stomach. He has a washboard stomach, sweaty, T-shirt stuck to it. I watched him glaring. He disturbs me. Something about him makes me detest him. I don't know if he's on the verge of genius, psychosomatic and insane, or just really dumb. An idiot. I suspect he's an idiot. I cringe. The others don't talk to him, except to debase him. He says nothing to them. He mumbles, his head hanging. I pity him. I don't want to see him. I don't want to look at him. Because I want to kick his face in. 'Shut up! Shut the fuck up!’ Chonko gnashes his teeth. The gland won't seal. Oil seeps out of the cylinder and glistens on everything. It's sticky and luminous and pink. My skin itches. It smells like Snapple lemonade. Sweet and Sour. Bittersweet. 'Daniels don't have to shut up, you shut up... Daniels...'
​
'Why don't you people ever do any fucking work?’ Carson glowers madly, vein in his temple, under his eye, flaring.
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'Who the fuck, you people!’ A light-skinned black guy stepped up to him. He was a foot taller than Carson, almost bald, head shaved, an angular jaw with high full round cheekbones, his body perfectly designed, hard, chiseled, perfectly proportioned, and he knew it— vanity and arrogance glowing in his pores. His T-shirt bleached and starched, a clean summer breeze, coveralls hanging around his waist, tied with the sleeves, pressed neatly, crisp. He didn't have a drop of oil on him. Neither did his black mates. 'You got a problem, Yo?’ His fists clenched, arms poised at his side. He glowered down at Carson, eyes pulsing, fiery, impaled with want of blood.
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Carson shook—'You want some?' he said, shaking even more furiously, a rage in him lusting for violence, needing it. I looked into his eyes and I saw this thing in him, something not right, a man, or beast, it was hideous, dark and deep, and lovely. The two mad creatures trembled in maddening fury getting high on it like meth fiends, snarling, snorting, sniffing, scent of blood and hate throbbing in the space. They pulsed.
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'I'll fuckin' kill you,' Carson snarled.
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'Alright, do it then punk.' The yellow black mustang said, calmly, confidently. His name is Mitty.
​
I watched them breathe. Rising and falling. I chuckled and hung my head, wiping my slick greasy contaminated hands on an oily rag. It was sticky and gleaming and wasn't doing anything to clean my hands. It reminded me of a cum rag used too much. We were all out of clean rags. They were all on the deck, heavy and dark, soaking up the dripping pools of fluid. 'You guys aren't going to do anything,' I said. All bark, no bite.
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'What? What bitch!' They both turned to me.
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'You got something to say?' Black Mitty said.
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'I'll fuckin kill you next!' Carson stuttered, swallowing hard.
​
I peered up at them under my brow— staring, bored, repulsed, disfigured, disdainful, and detached. And laughed, a small wretched laugh. A sinister pain in me. I scared myself.
December... 1995
Somewhere in the Red Sea
Tensions mount. There is no release. There is nowhere to go. We haven't pulled-in for two months. We haven't seen land. Every day is work. 12-18 hour days. Oil and JP-5 and skin-smothering grease. Stale air and dust. Breath hot. I cannot get out. General Quarters! General Quarters! The crew is agitated. Sick of shit! Don't do this! Don't do that! Not like that! Like this! Shave! Get a haircut! Shave closer! Don't do that! What are you doing? Why? What are you doing?! Iron those dungarees. Where are you going? There is nowhere to go. Madness. It seethes. I see it in their eyes, simmering in the flesh. A word. A look. A gesture. And the froth boils over. There are fights. Arguments. Hate. Whites hate blacks. Blacks hate whites. Whites hate whites. I don't like them. I don't like the blacks. I don't like their music and their chants. I don't like their hand gestures. It's violent. It's angry. A testosterone culture. It glorifies murder. And gang rape. They are loud. They howl and cackle and fall around when they laugh. And they don't care who they disturb. They want to be heard. I do not like the whites. They hate the blacks. And they don't like me. The whites are vulgar and violent, but in a different way, a sinister way. Cold. Indifferent. Mad. They spit and curse and gnash their teeth, like demons. They write coldhearted letters on bombs with fucked-up twisted sneers of pleasure and light up cities with crimson rage, blowing crimson tides. The blacks talk about Bloods and Crypts and caps in the ass but I think they are mostly talk. If they wanted to be in a gang, or really respected that shit, they would be back in the street still. Bloods and Crypts. Not here. This is gang America, gang USA. It is something different with the blacks. They react. They feel walled in, under siege, condemned, oppressed, persecuted, emasculated. The service offers a job, a way out, security, money for college. I can understand that. But the whites, they believe in this shit. They are true believers. And the hate flows through them. There is a glint in their eyes when they build bombs, when they handle HARM missiles, and gun-metal. Lust. They want to see the end of their work. The blood spray. They play-fuck wildly, dry humping in machinery rooms and down in the holes, the way dogs hump legs (meant to be a kind of ironic anti-homosexual mimesis of homosexuality). A frenzy. A testosterone culture. A rape culture. A gun culture. Kill! Kill! Kill! It's not about freedom.
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There is a smoldering stillness on deck like the eerie charged quiet before a storm, something rising.