I don’t know how that bastard Bandit does it. Women seem to think he’s so cool that butter won’t melt in his mouth on a hot day. It must be that Barry White baritone of his.
I figured that since he’s out of town, enjoying his world fuckin’ cruise, I could score on all the loose babes. I tried Harold’s, The Alhambra, Royale,The Spot and Rebels.Nothin’. I mean zip. I even tried to put on the charm. I treated one woman to a free beer, goddamn it. Nothin’.Bandit’s haunted every beer dive, gin mill, sleazy saloon, slap happy hour hoo haa, unfortunately his legacy lingers like bad cheese.
I’ve got news for Bandit, he ain’t the coolest dude in town?and I’ve got news for you out there in digital space?
Bandit Reports In—-
It’s 10:15 Wednesday night (EST), 70 miles outside of the Chesapeake Bay. We are rolling along at 17.4 knots with a bearing of almost due north. The seas have a gentle swell to them, but are as glassy as a mirror, reflecting a nearly orange full moon that’s almost on the water and glows like a pumpkin-colored street lamp leading ships across the Atlantic.
Last Friday I awoke to what I believed was the ship getting underway after being anchored outside the mouth of the Savannah River, leading some 30 miles from our dock up the narrow river. I sat up in bed anxious to see us get underway and get into port. I had a mission, actually several. When I looked out the large brass porthole I caught the last docking moves put to the hull by a seagoing tug called General Oglethorpe. We were already in port and secured. I jumped out of the sack like a sailor who missed his watch.
I’m discovering that we are like a delivery truck for general cargo on the sea. If you need something shipped, they’ll pack it away and run it anywhere you want to go. I wonder if the factory needs a bunch of new models shipped to Germany. As it stands, once we leave Baltimore we’ll be empty during our rough seas winter Atlantic crossing. With all the cranes perched top side on this monster, we’ll be top heavy. Give us a call if you have anything to ship. We need the weight or it’s a suicide mission. There is no set schedule that doesn’t change. We had some 70,000 tons of lead in the hull of the ship and we were unloading a substantial amount at the Newport docks off Crossgate Street in Garden City at the Wentworth Port. This ship is designed to carry anything that won’t fit in a container. I suppose they didn’t pack containers full of lead bars due to the weight. Lead is nearly the heaviest metal around. There are only two heavier, mercury and osmium, a rare mercury-like substance. One set of bars strapped together with four double wide shipping straps weighs a ton. It’s about the size of a Harley engine crate.
The union dock workers took over the three 20-ton rusting cranes on the ship and began to unload one clump of lead bars at a time. But they were dismayed with the speed of the process and started to look around for alternatives. There were eight fork lifts on the dock. Fork lifts took a pack of bars from a crane drop and moved it to the center of the pier, then another moved the block of lead off the pier. Over the next four days several efforts were made to streamline the process. First fork lifts were hoisted aboard and into the bottom of the holds. They could stack the blocks over the cables. Then platforms were connected to the cranes and lowered into the holds for the fork lifts to stack on. Finally a system was brought in with two platforms that were attached by cable to another super structure that held the cables over the corners of the platforms and was connected to the crane hooks. This way the crane could drop a batch, be unhooked and hooked to another platform. While the platform on the dock was being unloaded, they loaded another one on the ship.
What was going to be a two-day operation turned into four and the captain gleefully told us each day of the new schedule. I’m discovering that as he tells us one schedule, it could change to something else, but who the fuck cares, I’m just here for the ride. Tuesday night we pulled out of Savannah about two hours late, and the brothers on the dock worked right up to the second we left. The captain informed us that our next stop was a mere 12 hours away in Newport News, Virginia, on the James River, a small port and naval town near Norfolk, an hour from Richmond. I called Lee Clemens from Departure Bike Works who has been a friend for 20 years. Lee was going to hop on his bike and come down for lunch, but when I got up this morning I hit the bridge to find out that we were still 450 miles from Newport.
When I spoke to the captain the night before, he expressed a strong desire to pour the coals to the ass end of this rust-soaked puppy. I’m one deck below the bridge in the cabin next to the captain’s. The vibration on E-deck is enough to shake my teeth loose. While on the bridge I asked him about the vibration, assuming that the main shaft was out of balance. We had just had a fire alarm go off in the engine room and the captain nervously told us that it was no big deal. Fuck, I didn’t pay any attention to the alarm. I didn’t know where to go in the event of an alarm anyway, but I assumed that someone would tell me what to do if we were floundering in the chilly Atlantic waters. At least we could go down in the Gulf Stream and be swimming in tepid waters. The clevis pins holding the life boats on this sucker have been painted a dozen times in 20 years and it would be virtually impossible to free them to lower the boats. I checked my life jacket and the rats hadn’t carried all the stuffing away to make their nests.
The captain straightened me out on the vibration, I think. He had stoked the fires below because he was trying to build speed against the current. Since we were running hard in shallow waters leading out of the harbor, the close bottom enhanced the vibration. The hatches up and down the halls clinked and rattled like old ice machines. We were on two missions: One, to avoid a tropical storm that was whipping its way toward the coast. The other was to get this creaking bastard into Newport to have one of the holds industrially cleaned after the fire in Japan.
I got the hell off in Savannah on the day of the Hog Chapter Toy Run to Old Town Savannah and was able to catch the Christmas parade on River Street, beside the river. As the girls danced past in their tights, I remembered my mission, to find a whore house on the streets that just 20 years ago were crowded with prostitutes. Hell, River Street was made of rectangular granite stones that were used as ballast on ships coming from Europe to grab a load of cotton for the English crowd. Oglethorpe founded Savannah, but couldn’t own land due to his contract. Each guy who wanted to make a life in Savannah and guard the north from the Spanish to the south was given 50 acres and a cow for a start. After the Civil War, General Sherman promised blacks 40 acres and a cow to help them get started once they were freed but that deal was never implemented.
The history in Savannah was incredible, and I can’t remember half of what I learned, but here’s a tidbit: Oglethorpe was a brother. While he was here in America, a friend of his went broke in England and they threw him in debtors’ prison, where he died of small pox. When Oglethorpe found out, it pissed him off and he offered to take debtors to America to keep them out of prisons. The English government was cool with the idea because they didn’t have to house the prisoners, but they had a stipulation that the people still needed to pay their debts. When they arrived in the colonies, Oglethorpe’s crew took plaster prints of their teeth and put them to work in the city doing servant work (he wouldn’t allow slaves in town). They worked like that for four to seven years to pay off their debts, and then they could have their 50 acres and Betsy. That’s where the term indentured servants came from.
I’m proud to announce that last night while we tossed and turned on the briny Atlantic that I finished the fifth chapter of the second book of the Chance series. Maybe we should go ahead and launch chapters in the Cantina. Let me know what you think. This shit is steamy and I don’t mean the fuckin’ boiler room.
The schedule right now claims that we will only be in Newport News for six hours before heading up to Baltimore on the Chesapeake for several days. Then we’ll head across the Atlantic for Germany. I’ll report in after a couple days.
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