A Lifetime of Experience - Aloha oi!

[UberGoober]

Within a few days of hitting the ground on Hawaii I knew I wanted a bike. Of course my desire defied logic. I was working on a ship at the time, without a fixed address or a garage – hell I wasn’t even on land most of the time. Why I was so fixated on getting a bike I’ll never know, but like many times in my life once the goal was fixed in my mind I worked hard to achieve it.

Fortunately the ship I was working on, the SS Constitution, was a cruise ship that had a regular rotation. Every Saturday morning would find us docked in Honolulu at a pier right behind the Aloha Tower. On Sundays we would cruise the waters around Molokai and Monday morning we would dock in Maui. Tuesday morning we arrived in Hilo on the Big Island where we would stay until late in the evening before making a night time run to the other side of the island where we would anchor out close to the resorts at Kona. From Kona we would make another night run to the other end of the Hawaiian Islands, arriving in Kauai Thursday morning. We would remain there until Friday evening when we headed back to Honolulu, again over night, arriving on Saturday morning pick up fresh supplies and a new load of passengers.

The job itself sucked. Since I had only recently joined the Merchant Marines and since this was my first assignment, common sense and US Coast Guard regulations dictated that I start at the bottom. My job title said it all: “Wiper.”

The job of wiper is not a glamorous one. You do basically what your job title specifies, wipe things up. It is the bottom rung of the ladder and you are essentially an apprentice. Of course experiences vary from ship to ship. On a fairly new ship, for example, the job is essentially a janitorial job that also involves working alongside licensed and certified engineers while you learn the trade. On an old ship there is a lot more to do and a lot more stress in general.

Like any job, stress can be increased when you have to work with assholes. Since there are relatively few shipping jobs in the American Merchant marine anymore, the community is a small one and people get to know one another. Good guys get good jobs on newer ships, incompetents, guys with drug or alcohol addictions or people with personality problems get crappy low paying jobs, usually on older ships. Just for reference, the Constitution was 42 years old when I first stepped foot upon her decks so you can infer who I ended up with.

Over the course of a few weeks I was generally treated poorly and assigned shitty jobs to do. There were 7 other wipers on the ship at the time and I don’t think any of us were treated well. Still, we persevered and did as we were told, knowing one day the wheel would turn. One day, presumably when all the shittier jobs had been done, my own personal wheel turned and I was sent to clean out a bearing locker.

All mechanical things have bearings, well all mechanical things that spin have them anyway, and as you can imagine a ship’s engine room is nothing but a giant mass of whirling spinning machines of all different types and sizes thus necessitating many different bearings. And, since ships spend most of their time at sea, you can’t send to the store for a part if something breaks so you have to carry your own warehouse with you as you go. Logic follows then that the locker I was sent to clean held hundreds of different sizes and types of bearings, each in its own box on its own shelf. Well, they should have been anyhow except that ships also pitch and roll, which makes it hard to keep things on shelves - you get where I’m going. The locker was a mess and most of the bearings were on the floor in a giant pile, some in their boxes some out, and it was up to me to sort them out.

Now it just so happens that I went to vocational school to learn how to manage a warehouse and I knew just how to set things straight. Of course every idiot knows what you do is look at the numbers on the boxes and then pile boxes with the same numbers together. You then write the numbers on the shelf and then stack the boxes above their number and you have an organized warehouse. But I was more than an idiot, I was an idiot with a vocational certification - I was a pro and I did a bang-up job. I also put a piece of angle iron on the front edge of the shelf to stop the bearings from sliding off again and, viola, the room was clean and organized for quite probably the first time since the ship slid down the slipways.

The Chief Engineer, a guy who I had never even seen before because he spent most of his time up on the lido deck while his subordinates supervised us peons, somehow found the locker I had cleaned up and was shocked at how orderly it was. At once I was plucked from the bilges – I mean the actual bilges here, I am not using some rhetorical device – and assigned to work in the Chief Engineer’s office. I was asked to sort out all the 42 year old ship’s blueprints and do other work above my station and I, knowing I had several weeks left to serve, determined that the job would take just the amount of time I had left on board. This pissed off the First engineer by the way, but he was a dick so screw him.

(Photo Caption - The SS Constitution docked at Aloha Tower)

[UberGoober]

(Part II)

Now, how does this relate to motorcycles? What this meant was that I didn’t have to help load supplies and stuff on Saturday afternoons anymore so I got time off in Honolulu. That meant I could get a bike.

Like a lot of things I have done in my life, I leapt before I looked. I spent my first Saturday off at a row of bike dealerships under the Nimitz Freeway – having walked the 5 or 6 miles there from the Aloha Tower in order to save the $4.00 I would have spent on a cab ride, and put my money down on an ever so slightly used Kawasaki KE-100 enduro. Or, to the layman, a small dirt bike I could ride on the street.

Of course fate helps children and fools and it was fortunate I didn’t have all the cash that day. I put down a sizable deposit on the bike, which they happily accepted, and told them I would come back in a week. Disappointing as it was to have to wait, it turned out to be a good thing because during the time we were making our next circuit of the islands I realized my little bike, left all alone on the street somewhere, would have been gone within a day or two. I needed a place to keep it.

A week later my ship was back in Honolulu and I had my bike. Prior to going to the dealership, I rented a small space in an indoor lock and store close to where we docked and my plan was perfectly complete. There was a catch of course. Being an indoor lock and store, they told me that I had to drain the bike’s gas tank before putting it into its wooden storage box each week. They seemed quite adamant about this when the rented me the space and I assured them I would. Of course I quickly forgot about my promise and I wonder now how they never noticed that every Saturday I pushed my supposedly gassless bike from its box to the street where I kick started the little beast and roared off in a haze of blue two stroke smoke.

The bike itself was wonderful and surprisingly good at running around city streets. More powerful than a scooter, my bike stayed right with traffic and was light as a feather in the turns. It was always fun to ride right at its limits and then throw down into corners. I was soon all racing all over the city at tremendous speeds approaching a maximum of 50 mph, ferreting out the things I needed for my other hobby, Japanese comic books.

My bike became a regular alongside the dock, too. Aloha Tower was, back then, a virtually empty parking lot underneath and I would just whip in off the street, zip past the guards and park my bike 20 feet from the crew’s gangplank. One day, I let one of my friends try the bike and he was busted for doing wheelies there. Still, perhaps because this was Hawaii, no one seemed too stressed about me bringing it back the next week and before long it was quite normal to everyone. And, when we left each week, I’d have my bike back in its storage locker safely under lock and key waiting for my next day off. It was a satisfying routine.

This went on for a couple of months until the time came at last for me to sign off. I had enough sea time under my belt to take the test for better jobs and there was no need to stay where aboard the Constitution any longer. Besides, by this point the First Engineer had it out for me because I had been so successful at dodging his shitty work assignments that it was time to go anyhow.

Knowing I was about to leave, I asked around the ship to see if anyone wanted to buy the bike but all I got were a few low ball offers from dickheads who thought they could make a few bucks out of the situation. In the end, I decided to have the bike crated and shipped back the Washington state. Before I left the islands, I spent about a week in Honolulu after I signed off the ship and had a great time bombing around the island with my bike. I went all the places I couldn’t reach in the few hours I had off each week and got a feel for the countryside outside of Honolulu. It really was one of the best vacations I ever had. The day before I left, I took the bike to the local Honda dealer who, for a fee, crated and put my bike aboard a ship heading home. It cost me a few hundred bucks, but I was pleased when I got the news I had a package waiting for on the dock in Seattle a few weeks later.

I took my father’s old pick-up down town and brought the crate back to the house. In a couple of hours I had the bike up and running and used it around the house for most of the summer. I left it in the wood shed when I went on other ships and it was always there, ready and waiting when I came home. Eventually, my father told me a friend of his from work was looking for a small bike for his daughter and since I had a larger street bike anyhow, I decided to sell the KE. I wish now I hadn’t, I really wasn’t done with it but like lots of things in life it was something I discovered after the fact.

But I had a taste for little motorcycles by then, and would own other small bikes over the coming years. Still, the KE was my first little bike and I remember it fondly.

[LaurenOE]

Nice story. Reminds me of my time in Hawaii.