I came back from the Persian Gulf War with an honorable discharge in one hand and a head full of bad ideas in the other. Twenty-one. Old enough to have seen some shit, young enough to still be a complete goddamn idiot about everything that mattered. My ticket out of the Navy landed me right back in the only world I knew: Continental Maritime in San Diego. Shipyards and sweat.
The place had its own kind of gritty romance, sitting right under the Coronado Bridge. Fog would roll in off the bay at dawn like a dirty blanket, and at night, the welding torches and floodlights would give it this industrial glow, like a scene from some Hemingway novel he was too drunk to write. The air smelled of salt, diesel, rust, and the faint, sweet rot of bad decisions. It was my kind of place.
I’d worked there before I enlisted, climbed up from a grunt to a journeyman, learned how to do something with my hands besides get into trouble. Now I was back, and the Navy had given me just enough technical know-how to be dangerous and just enough confidence to be a real asshole. They saw something in me, maybe just my ability to bullshit with authority, so they handed me a stack of blueprints for the USS New Orleans and said, “Go measure every pipe—size, thickness, material. Quote the whole damn job.”
I had no college degree. No high school diploma. Just a young man’s ego, a tape measure, and a can of spray paint.
But I did it. A month of crawling through the guts of that ship, spray-painting pipes, taking notes, figuring shit out. I came in ten grand under the highest bid. So when it came time to pick a lead man for the project, nobody else volunteered. It was the oldest trick in the book: “You bid it, you run it.” A promotion that was really just a punishment. Suddenly, I was management. No more breaking my back, no more filthy hands. Just paperwork, headaches, and a whole new level of bullshit.
And that’s when I learned the first hard truth of my new life: managing grown men is like babysitting toddlers with nicotine addictions and worse tempers.
~
8-Ball and The Wife That Laid Him Out
One of my best guys was 8-Ball. A dark-skinned, high-energy workhorse. He had no real skills, couldn’t weld a straight line to save his life, but he had heart. Showed up on time, every time, ran from the trolley station to get to work like he was headed to church. The kind of guy you give a little extra respect to because he actually gives a shit in a world full of guys who don’t.
Then one day, poof. He disappears.
Thirty days go by. No call, no word, nothing. Then one morning, he just shows up, bandaged like a car crash victim, looking like he’d lost a fistfight with God himself.
“Boss,” he says, his voice all shaky. “Can I have my job back?”
I leaned back in my government-issue metal desk, the chair groaning under my weight. “8-Ball, where the hell have you been?”
He sighed this long, tired sigh and peeled back a bandage on his head. Nine goddamn staples, holding his scalp together.
Turns out, one night, he’d finally decided to stand up to his wife. She was three times his size, loud, mean as a cornered snake. He finally snapped, told her to go to hell, called her a nasty bitch, something like that. And for one glorious, shining second, he thought he’d won.
Then she, being built like a goddamn refrigerator, apparently picked him up like a sack of groceries, bodyslammed him clean through the kitchen table, ripped off a broken table leg, and whacked him in the skull so hard he said he saw Jesus and the twelve apostles.
Then she called the cops on him.
Domestic violence charge. A month lost in the system. And now here he was, humbled, stitched together, begging for his job back.
Of course, I gave it to him. Any man who survives that deserves another shot.
~
The Vegas Con Man and The Ocean Baptism
Then there was this asshole from Vegas.
We’re halfway through the project, behind schedule, and management is breathing down my neck. Suddenly, this chubby, dark-skinned guy just appears on the ship.
“You Jim?” he asks.
“Yeah. Who the hell are you?”
“I’m your new guy. Paul from upstairs hired me. I’m a journeyman. Here’s my paperwork.”
Now, journeyman status is earned. It’s paid for in blood and sweat. I had to bust my ass for mine. This guy? He rolls in with a plastic trash bag full of shitty, mismatched tools that looked like he’d stolen them from his grandfather’s garage.
This motherfucker…
I rode my beat-up beach cruiser straight to the office to confront Paul, the old, silver-haired prick who ran things. He barely looked up from his newspaper.
“Not your boat, Jim,” he said, his voice bored. “It’s my boat. You just work here. Now go deal with it.”
I rode back, my ego bruised and bleeding, walked onto the New Orleans, and went three flights down into the guts of the ship to check on my new journeyman. Four hours later, he’d done maybe thirty minutes of actual work.
I let him have it. “If you’re getting journeyman pay, I expect journeyman work. You’re taking money out of my goddamn budget, so I need you to get your shit together and earn it.”
He turned, looked me dead in the eye with a placid little smile, and said:
“You need to chill the fuck out.”
His first day on the job. And he told me to chill the fuck out.
I was 6’4”, built like a goddamn war machine, and running on a high-octane mix of stress, nicotine, and pure, uncut rage. My hands twitched. Every blue-collar instinct in my body screamed at me to grab him by his fat neck and introduce his face to a steel bulkhead.
Instead, I turned around and walked away. Went back to my little office, sat down at that metal desk, and just fumed. Sat there thinking about all the ways I could ruin him, all the ways I could make his life a living hell.
And then, sitting there, letting the rage burn down to a cold, hard coal in my gut, it hit me. A beautiful, simple, elegant piece of bastardly inspiration. You don’t fight a rat head-on. You just take away his sewer.
That night, when everyone was gone and the shipyard was quiet except for the groaning of the ships and the cries of the gulls, I walked down to where he kept his stuff. I grabbed his plastic trash bag of shitty tools, his hard hat, his gloves.
I stepped outside, onto the edge of the barge, took a deep breath of that salty night air…
And with one clean motion, I heaved the whole fucking thing into the ocean.
It hit the black water with a quiet thump and vanished. No big splash, no drama. Just gone. Erased. Goddamn, it felt amazing. I slept like a baby that night. Probably even made love to my wife without needing a drink first.
The next morning, he shows up, all suited up, ready for another day of stealing my money. Except… no tools.
He comes up to my desk. He looks at me. “Boss… my tools are gone.”
Without missing a beat, I reached into my desk, grabbed a pre-filled termination form I’d written up just for the occasion, slapped it down in front of him, and said:
“No tools? No job. Get the fuck out.”
For the first time, he actually called me Boss.
And for the first time, he actually realized—
He was nothing.
He just stood there for a minute. Then he turned and walked up to Paul’s office, whining like a little bitch. Paul came down later, a slow chuckle rumbling in his chest.
“Jesus Christ, Jim,” he said, shaking his head. “You really fucked that guy over, huh?”
And that was the last I ever saw of the journeyman fraud from Vegas.
