Half out of my head from heat and hangover, dying of thirst and near exhaustion, I hobbled down a desolate dead-end road on Stock Island, beyond a decayed dog racing track, past Alex’ auto wreckers. Mangroves, stinking, mosquito-laden, crowded in on the right. On my left, three junkyard brawlers snarled at me through barbed wire. There was more value in the rusted and gutted wrecks behind the fence than the one inside tattered rags I was wearing.
      An insistent honking woke me from my mutterings. Reeling down the middle of the road. I turned around, stuck out my thumb and got my first sight of Charlie. ¾ Cabs of Japanese pickup trucks were never designed for something that big, few things are.
      Stopping beside me with the engine running, he stated, "There's nothing down that road.” I heard the implied "for you" in the tone of his voice.
      Scrabbling for the do-gooder's chit in my pocket, I held it out to him in a shaking hand, explaining that I had business out there, that I had a job at a salvage company located at the end of this very road.
Refusing to touch it, he looked at the stained and wrinkled scrap of paper. I saw his eyebrows arch in disbelief. There was a skeptical half-smile stretched across his round face and a challenge in the steely-blue eyes surrounded by webs of sun-scorched lines.
      "I need a whole man, not a half-drunk.” He grunted a sour chuckle.
      The crushing despair, seeing my last chance vanish before my eyes caused something to snap. There was a crackling, sizzling pop somewhere inside my head. My vision blurred to red. The next thing I knew I was trying to drag a man twice my size through the window of his truck. I must have passed out because I next found myself lying flat on my back with him towering over me—he would have towered if I'd been standing, but from that angle he looked twelve feet tall.
      "You either got guts or brain damage. I'm not sure which," he said in a thoughtful Virginian drawl then laughed; this time it was with genuine humor. "Bubba, if you want work bad enough to tackle me then work you'll git.” Gesturing over his shoulder with his thumb. "In the back. ‘Til we can get you smelling a damn-sight better that's where you ride”
      Unsure what I was in for—but knowing that riding was infinitely preferable to walking—I scrambled aboard fitting myself into a small corner amid a rusty jumble of cables, tools and odd machine parts.
      It was from that vantage that my new life appeared as we rounded the last curve in the road.
      Inside a tall chain-link fence topped with rolled razor wire, five fuel tanks, each as big as a house, framed the gateway, Faded logos on their rusty white exteriors admitted that they had, in better days, owed allegiance to Gulf Oil.

     Ringed with water on three sides, the spit of land was almost a quarter mile long and nearly three hundred yards at its widest. Heat waves shimmied above a bare coral expanse graded flat and baked hard by the sun.
      The east and southern shorelines were natural, fringed with man-groves and congested with debris at the water's edge. Just offshore, a large black barge had been grounded. Tilted at an angle, it was loaded with rusty steel construction members and large pieces of heavy equipment, the nature of which I could only  guess.
      A row of decrepit fishing boats, propped up on shores, dominated the center of the property. Near the closest of the four derelicts, stood a faded blue Trav-l-lift with several missing wheels and the engine compartment a gaping hole. Abandoned and forgotten, this was clearly the end of the line for those decaying hulks, which further drove home the nature of my own status.
      I saw a dust devil spring into life, stir the pale-yellow ashes of someone's dreams of prosperity, and die. It was over ninety degrees but a shiver ran down the middle of my back and gave my shoulders a violent rattle.
      We stopped by a large single-story building. Of the layers of painted over names and signs, each a testament to the progression of businesses that had tried to make a go of it, in letters over six feet tall, one word was still partially decipherable: CO M S RY.
      Beyond, perhaps half a mile across at its widest lay a deep-water inlet. Beginning in the shadow of a large ice plant at its mouth, the opposite shore was a profusion of boats of all sizes and descriptions filling the docks four-deep, unloading at fish packing plants and taking on supplies from row upon row of warehouses. Everywhere, people were working, money was being spent and made, everything was motion and momentum.

      At the narrow end of the watery cul-de-sac, clustered about finger piers, fuel docks, bait shops and marinas, a forest of sailing masts swayed, rigging rapping and tinkling brightly in the wakes of cabin cruisers and speedboats. Brilliant hulls, sparkling brightwork, and pristine pennants radiated a multi-hued psychedelia of wealth and grace. On this side of the inlet a rectangular cove of cracked concrete had been cut into the coral, reinforced here and there with rusty sheets of pleated steel and hung with rotting tires. Moored to the near side, in front of the CO M S RY building sat a sad rust-bucket. ¾ While living on the Mississippi I'd seen plenty, though usually from a comfortably insulated, air-conditioned distance.¾ Having begun life as a steel barge, nearly a hundred feet long, it was maybe a third of that wide. Squatting on the starboard bow, like the skeletal remains of some prehistoric insect, was a scabrous old crane minus its track-driven chassis. A dredging bucket lay open on its side by the base. Further aft, a blocky structure with watertight doors and portholes, was capped by a wheelhouse its roof nearly twenty feet above the deck was a jumble of antennae and spotlights.
      A sinking sensation pulled inside of me, like riding an elevator in a tall building, plunging downward, ever downward.
      Between the floating disaster and the defunct tank farm sat a huge mound of trash that dwarfed the barge in sheer mass and ugliness. Ragged pieces of boat cabins, sections of hulls, miles of rusty chain, cable, machinery, parts, pieces, and seaweed covered fish traps, sup-ported the half-rotted carcass of a sea-plane, complete with a pair of impact-crushed pontoons and half a wing.
      The elevator gathered speed as it passed the sub-basement level.
      Everything looked almost as bad and confused as I felt. Since I didn't have many options, anything, even this was better than the nothing I had.

     I jumped down from the pickup. Tremors rattled my bones as my knees absorbed the impact. When my internal elevator ride lurched to a stop, a little voice called: ‘Everyone out for Rock Bottom.’


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      Each day, I soon learned, began at first light and ended well after sunset with me so totally whipped I could hardly see straight let alone walk. I quickly fell into a love-hate relationship with the job; I loved hating it. But I was determined to show this guy that I was worth something. Thinking back, I guess I was trying to prove it to myself.
      The majority of our work seemed to revolve around adding to and whittling away at the huge pile of junk on the dock, which I’d dubbed Mt. Trashmore. We scavenged every kind of wreckage on and under the water then cut down and chopped up everything into usable and saleable parts. Marine and aviation rigging was broken down and sorted into basic components, saving all of the little bits; nuts, bolts, and fasteners in plastic pails. Every bit, no matter how small, exotic, damaged, or obsolete, had value. I sometimes wondered how far down the list of salvaged items my name would appear?
      My probation lasted for two weeks; most of that time was spent trying to keep up with a guy who didn't seem to know the meaning of the word ‘tired’. One of Charlie's favorite tricks, when we had finished working on a particular section of Trashmore, was to heft the two oxy-acetylene tanks, in one smooth motion, up onto his shoulders as if they were nothing before moving to the next site. I was the pathetic wretch struggling not to fall behind as I tried to keep the torch and its long loops of double hose from dragging across the ground.
      Slowly, days stretched into weeks, gathered momentum and spun into months. Hard work and good food filled out the work clothes Charlie'd found for me—what I'd arrived in he’d deemed only fit for burning. A sensible person—not me—would've stood upwind. I clearly remember the foul taste, burning eyes, racking coughs, and the sound of Charlie's booming laughter, as the remnants of my past went up in flames.
      Adapting to the workload, I began missing my vices but quickly learned that alcohol and tobacco had no place in the scheme of things. Charlie'd made a promise, which I learned was to him a sacred bond, that I "...would shape up and fly right come Hell or high water." True to his word he kept me on a pretty tight rein and increased the daily chores proportionately, so that they continued to demand every last bit of strength I could muster. Before long the cravings were gone.
      At six months I tipped the scales at a hundred and eighty; in New Orleans I had averaged one-thirty. The brown hair I'd tied back in a long ponytail, was now sun-bleached to copper and gold, and cut hot-weather short. I also noticed that my eyes, previously a smoke and booze tinted red, had deep amber and green irises surrounded by clear sparkling whites, and instead of the pasty green-gray night-crawler pallor the sun had baked my skin to a rich golden bronze. Each day still finished with me dog-tired but I was now keeping pace and Charlie noticed. Despite our size difference—my slender five-eight to his massive six-foot four—the almost twenty-year age difference between us had become a determining factor. More often than not, sweat running from his thick black hair that was generously salted with life, when Charlie called it a day I was still going strong.
      I knew that my place on the salvage list had moved up when he included me in the planning phases of our jobs and began teaching me the intricacies of marine salvage. I thrived on each new challenge, and as my experience grew, we began implementing, with increasing frequency, many of my ideas.
      New Orleans slipped further into the past.

      Over the next two years our mutual respect grew and developed into a friendship the quality of which I'd never before known. There were no ulterior motives only a quiet and genuine liking for each other, strengthened by shared risk and hard work. There wasn't a job we wouldn't tackle from installing piers to raising sunken fishing boats. Once, we salvaged a crashed helicopter far out in the heart of the Gulf of Mexico...but that's another story.

 

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