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Friday, September 15, 2017

The Sea-Daddy Saga: The King Barge

Sea-Daddy is a senior gentleman from Faulkner’s country, who speaks with the considered cadence of Shelby Foote and the wit of George Carlin.

Boutique Companies and Texas Hats


It’s a thing, where pampered wealthy guys stand around and compare their holdings, so to speak, what they own and how cool it is. The smart ones would sell out immediately. The dumb ones would hang on and be exploited for a year or two and then sell to one of their friends.

The divers, the rules of diving, “if I ever had one like it, it’s mine.” Divers will steal and they do it instinctively and feel no guilt. They can rationalize any reason for stealing that you can imagine. They are ruthless and there is a competition as to who can steal the most. It’s like a gonif, [a Yiddish] word, a thief and dishonest, but kind of cute, so it’s okay, an interesting word that describes those guys.

The Barge


It’s 400' by 80' and most of the living quarters are below waterline. It is where the lower level workers stayed. If you had a little rank, you could get above deck accommodations, for lack of a better term, “officers,” company men. The engine rooms, galleys, recreation rooms, showers, all that stuff, is below the waterline and we called it steerage. The people that lived there didn’t call it steerage, they called the people that didn’t live their assholes.

I was an LST, Life Support Technician, responsible for the welfare of the divers when they were stored in the system and in the water, that they had the right breathing media. Temperature and humidity had to be controlled very closely. If you took a thermal image of a guy breathing helium, you will see that he’s expelling a lot of heat. One or two degrees one way or the other and he might freeze or burn up. If you let the humidity get high you can have skin conditions. Then there is the carbon dioxide that had to be controlled, tracking and controlling that trend.

The hardest thing of it all was to picture the actual universe you were controlling and the idea of controlling these spaces with different pressures, how you bring them together and separate them. The manipulation of space is hard to wrap your head around. You have this semi god-like attitude where you can make it rain or snow and you have to keep these people alive as you watch their mental degradation as the days stack up, and you might have to talk to their supervisor about giving them a day off. You might have a horrible home situation that factors into their attitude, so you have to be very conscious of your tone of voice. You are one of only one or two people they will talk to. The voice coming through the speaker tube has to be just right or it will piss them off—have to be like a smoothed-voice FM jockey, a tech/shrink/medical observer—and you have to be able to entertain them, be able to tell them something ridiculous that will make them laugh. They know you’re manipulating them, but if you do it with finesse they appreciate that. You have to sell yourself while you are saving them. I guess the only good thing about it is you got paid well enough and had the opportunity to save someone’s life, more important than anyone, a genuine change of value, timeless value, unaffected by the customs of society. You have totally left that beach society and are in this highly concentrated, exotic society. Not an elite group but a competent group, and mere competence can be elite these days.

Being a Sea-Daddy


Well, it’s an actual recognized position that’s not written down anywhere, a traditional thing. If you are somebody’s sea-daddy there is a certain amount of responsibility laid on you for that kid, because some people are so horrible you don’t want to be in that position, don’t want that weight on their head. But if he’s a good kid with potential and you think you can steer him, it is to your advantage to help him become more competent, and if he is a good one that looks likely, you best befriend him and help him out, because he might be signing your check in five years. These tenders had a habit of rising in the business—if you couldn’t save their life you could maybe save their career. Maybe when you’re old and grey he’ll say, “He wasn’t so bad, I’ll give that old fucker a job.”

It’s an extra duty and I can take it or leave it depending on my mood.

The Crew


Superintendent, in charge of job: this fellow was an old Southern boy who lived in the adjacent coastal village. The entire village was essentially his. He was the bwana.

Each shift, day and night, will have a supervisor running the dive. You are running the system and are limited to helping the supervisor.

The divers are all actually your superior, but they’ll lay respect on you because you’re wedded to the hip of the supervisor.

The tenders are the bottom of the list. Divers may or may not be valued more than the techs. More important than anyone is the equipment technician.

Servants


I think it’s a hopeful thing that people can buy servants in this day. I was never anything more than a servant. In some parts of the world you can buy a servant to do laundry and get your meals, check for mail, plus they clean up your room.

Silas and the Boss


In Africa, in the village, the Boss has a mansion, the whole village depends on this guy, has a mansion with servants, joy girls, and he has Silas. He was the Boss’s servant and would lord it over the crew and be obvious about it. They all hated him, he was like a caricature of a sneaky house servant. He treated everybody with contempt, white, black, German, French, American, a wicked little man. If he was being nice to you, you knew he was moving into position to screw you over. He got people fired off the deck.

(c) 2017 James LaFond

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