"You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat;
you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear."
Mark Twain
During my time on the Joy Keller, we had a mate who was a solid gold five-star jerk. He made the deckhand's lives hell with his petty, vindictive martinet ways, and was universally detested for it. The one exception was the captain because the mate would do the captain's dirty work, allowing the captain to keep the veneer of being a “good guy”.
His name was Mr. Smith*, and he was brought up, so to speak, by one of the biggest assholes that ever walked the line deck of a barge, a mate at Federal Barge Lines named Jack Thurman. I had heard plenty of tales about Jack Thurman back in my days of hiring out through the NMU hall in Joliet. Thurman had a habit of picking on the youngest, greenest deckhand in the crew and making the kid's life hell on earth. At one point, a new deckie that he had been picking on turned on him, and he ambushed him out on tow, whacking him in the back of the head with a cheater pipe (a long, heavy extension handle made of pipe for tightening ratchet turnbuckles) while they were making a lock on the Upper Mississippi one night. It laid Thurman out unconscious and bleeding. The deckhand walked back to the boat and up to the pilothouse, collapsed on the seat behind the pilot, and told the pilot to call the law, that he had just killed the mate. As it turned out, he hadn't killed Thurman, but he was off work for a long period with serious damage to the back of his head. You would think that something would be learned from an experience like that, but not Jack Thurman. When he finally came back, he was just as big of a bullying asshole as ever. I'm passing this along as background as to who Mr. Smith learned his trade from, and who he looked up to.
Watching most of this at a figurative distance was painful, as I had no say in any of it, it was not engine room business. He abused the deck crew with petty BS daily. They would be cleaning around the boat, and when they were done and taking a well-earned break, Mr. Smith would appear before them and proclaim something along the lines of, “I found dust. You need to figure out where.” Break over.
We had a young woman deckhand on the forward watch for a while. She was physically capable of the job, but she knew the job better than the watchman (lead deckhand on the forward watch) did, and the watchman was a minion of Smith's. The two of them proceeded to make her life a living hell, while the captain sat back, keeping quiet, sphinx-like. I'm certain that the fact that she was gay also factored heavily into this with all of them.
We were standing by somewhere while this was going on, and I needed to replace the jumper hoses between the boat's hard piping for the starboard main engine cooling system to the grid coolers with a more durable type of hose. This was in a void space alongside the starboard main engine, and some help would be good, so I asked Sarah if she would be OK with helping out. She was, so we gathered tools and materials and entered the void space.
Having her out of earshot from everybody else while we worked, I told her that, with changing attitudes, either the wheelhouse or the engine room was open to her, if she could hang on and weather the storm of abuse that was being landed on her on the Keller. She seemed at least somewhat relieved after our talk, but she quit the company right after that trip on the Keller, and would not answer calls from her friends on the boat.
Which brings us around to the main event. Midnight watch change came around on this particular night. My helper John squeezed his way into the booth at about 2300 to take the after watch, and John and I had a chat for a while, getting the boat's business out of the way first, and then carrying on with a general bull session for a bit. Around 2330, we said good night, and I went to my cabin, which is just off the booth and connected to it by a door.
I got undressed and settled into my bunk to read for a little while before lights out and hopefully, a decent night's sleep.
At about midnight, I was ready to turn the light out, when the yelling erupted in the booth and in the companionway outside my main door. I could tell from the voices that it was John and Smith, but I couldn't make out what was being said. Pretty soon, the door from the booth to my cabin opened, and John stuck his head in. “Would you come out and look into this?”, he asked. “Everything checks out, but that dumb son of a bitch won't take my word for it.” “OK, I'll be right there. Give me a minute to get dressed.”
I pulled on my clothes and stepped out into the companionway. John and Smith were standing at the main deck electrical panel, directly across from my door. “What's the problem here?”, I asked, and Smith went off into a rant. “The towknee lights are out! And this dumbass (meaning John) is telling me that nothing is wrong, but the towknee lights are out!”
A short explanation is in order here. At this point in time, we still used 120-volt running lights for the head of the tow. There was a port and starboard running light and a flashing yellow 180-degree light to mark the center of the tow's bow. These are as much as 1,400 feet from the boat, so the deck crew had to run out 200 foot long extension cords to power those running lights, and they plugged in on a weatherproof outlet on the starboard inboard tow knee, so this was where Smith was coming up with “towknee lights” when what he meant was “tow running lights”.
OK, easy enough to check. I opened the electrical panel and checked the circuit breakers. All the handles were pointed toward the middle of the panel, nothing tripped or turned off. I pointed this out to Smith to no avail, he was on his high horse and wasn't about to get off. “I don't give a shit if that breaker is on or not! There's no power out there and what the fuck are you going to do about it?”
OK, mister, you've gone too far. I was willing to be reasonable despite the rude start, but you had to push it.
Curtly, I told him to go out to the deck locker and wait for me, I needed to gather up some test equipment. He left, and once he was out of earshot, John grinned and said, “What are you going to do?” I told him to follow me out there but hang back in the deck locker.
I headed out into the engine room to get my “test equipment”, which was nothing more than a light bulb pigtail with a plug on it. On the way back, I ducked into the booth and picked up my little inductive tester. If this played out the way I was sure that it would, there would be some fun to be had with it at Smith's expense. I clipped the inductive tester into my pocket and went forward.
I passed through the deck locker and out onto the head of the boat and went over to the running light outlet on the towknee. Smith followed me out there, ragging on me all the way. I ignored him, unplugged the light cord, and looked it over, the plug and cord were in good shape. Pulling the pigtail out of my hip pocket, I plugged it into the running light outlet, and lo and behold, that 100-watt lamp lit up the head of the boat completely.
Mr. Smith didn't say a thing, so I did.
“WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?”, I yelled. “EXACTLY WHAT AND WHERE IS THE PROBLEM, MISTER SMITH? “LOOKS LIKE THE PROBLEM IS YOUR EXTENSION CORDS, MISTER SMITH! HERE, TAKE MY LITTLE TESTER AND START CHECKING YOUR EXTENSION CORDS TO FIND OUT EXACTLY WHERE YOUR EXTENSION CORDS ARE BAD! YOU CAN LEAVE IT ON MY DESK WHEN YOU ARE DONE, MISTER SMITH. AND DON'T YOU EVER GET ME OUT OF BED FOR ANYTHING LIKE THIS AGAIN!”
He had his back to the deck locker while I was yelling at him, but I was facing it and could see what was going on. Since it was watch change, all five of the deck crew were still out there, and all of them and John had a front-row seat to me showing him up for the ass that he really was, and if there was one thing that this little self-appointed kinglet couldn't stand, it was being made to look like an idiot in public in front of his supposed underlings.
I left him out there and headed back to my cabin, and the deck locker was roaring with laughter. This wasn't the last run-in that I had with Jack Thurman Junior, but it was the most satisfying.
