Working the Docks

Working the Docks

It’s 5 o’clock in the morning. A single light bulb sways overhead and creates yellow glare in the union hall. Smoke fills the room  from Swisher Sweets cigars lit repeatedly over domino games in the basement.  Hippies, freaks, and men from every country on planet Earth mill in front of the barred job window at the Ship Painters and Scalers Union, like sharks waiting to feed. The Union Hall is in Lusk Alley, San Francisco, South of Market Street. Lena’s soul food restaurant is around the corner. My friend has a thing for Lena. 

We press together tighter in front of the job window.  On the wall, the pegboard with our  numbers awaits the beginning of the job calling ceremony. Javouis Robbins, known to one and all as “Jiveass," sits on a beat up office chair behind the window, like an executive in a down-and- out company that can’t afford furniture. The ever present fedora over his bald spot keeps the yellow glare from bouncing off his head.  He starts to call  numbers for the day’s jobs.  “I want six mens on Coffee," he intones. His voice is beautiful, musical, lyrical. The next ten seconds are crucial if I’m going  to work today.

“Thirtysixfotynine!" yells Jiveass, running the numbers together at the speed of light. The music in his voice is gone. “Twenysenfifyfo!”  Believe me this is not a guy who took elocution lessons. I get less than a second to translate what he said and  yell “here!” “hay”, or some other identifying sound when my number is called.  If I don’t answer before he gets to the next number, I don’t work.  I yell “Hay!” in time to get the coffee job. He takes my number peg out of the board and throws it on the ledge in front of him.

Robbins frequently gets into loud arguments with men who don’t respond in time but want to work anyway. He never loses an argument, and he never relents. Some people say Jiveass keeps a gun back there.  “Unpopular.”  This word would be an appalling understatement for Jiveass Robbins.

Jiveass begins calling jobs again.“I want eight mens on hides," he intones.   Hides are foul smelling. Men have to burn their clothes after a day unloading hides. Other jobs include scaling rust off ships, unloading rubber, moving and organizing cargo in the warehouse. When the calling ceremony comes to a close, I pile into one car with up to seven other men for the drive to the San Francisco or Oakland docks. I speak only English, but most of the men don’t. The place would be a  linguist’s dream, but there is some unspoken convention that restricts dialogue. Silence reigns.

“Coffee” is a pretty good job. Before the container ships took over, crews like ours would crack open the hatch covers on the ships at dock and then, standing on top of  coffee sacks going down three or four decks, we would dig our way to the bottom.  The procedure goes like this: Two-man teams  swing each 100 pound coffee sack onto a pallet. A glove on one hand adds some leverage. A coffee hook in the other hand helps to grapple the end of the burlap coffee sack. When the pallet is filled with sacks, it is removed by the crane operator and placed on the dock.

The jobs are inherently dangerous. The crane has steel cables we attach to pallets, hatch covers, debris, anything to be lifted out of the work area. The cables can snap back unpredictably. There are heavy objects and debris underfoot and pallets swinging overhead. Stories circulate about fatalities, men crushed between a cargo load and the hull of a ship. A current story warned about a worker killed by a load of glass. “Look in all directions,” I was told. This includes “up," and  sometimes it took more than just looking, especially when working with rubber.

Rubber was baled into cubes made up of  flat sheets compressed and  bound tightly together by crossed steel bands.  The cubes were about three and a half to four feet in each dimension and weighed enough so  that no one ever tried to lift them. They have a low center of gravity, cling to the decks like  giant erasers, and seem to resist all movement. With effort, we roll and prod each cube onto the pallet. When the crane operator jerks a full pallet of rubber into the air to place it on the dock, a bale  sometimes comes loose. When this happens, down comes a  tightly compressed rubber cube. It’s like a  game of dodge ball, but the balls are cubes. They come from above, and they’re deadly.  The crew stands on a steel deck. The question is, when a rubber cube weighing nearly two hundred pounds strikes a  steel deck, which way will it bounce, how far will it go, and will it mow someone down along the way? No one bothers to calculate the geometry of the thing. We all dive behind posts, other loads, debris, anything.  Finally, the  rubber  comes to a rest after two or three big bounces and a few directional changes. No one gets hit, so no one’s out of the game today.

The men can be dangerous as well. There’s plenty of posturing and ego here. The dominoes games in the basement of the Union Hall are incomplete without a constant stream of insults and  bantering. Common practice is to slap down the pieces in macho defiance.  But dominoes is just a game, and everyone there plays it this way. On the job, things are serious. One day, I’m sitting next to a guy about as big as a house. He just got up and loosely tightened some turnbuckles on a load going into the hold of a ship.  Thinking of the safety of the workers who might be below us in the hold,  I got up and  retightened the turnbuckles. When I sat down again, he turned to me and said with quiet menace that if I ever did that again he’d kill me. I‘m sure he  meant it.

Sometimes the docks can present a surreal beauty. As usual, it’s 5:30 in the morning. Our cargo ship appears shrouded in thick fog as we approach. The ship is the only visible object under bright lights in the otherwise grey pre-dawn world of the port.  Mist flows and swirls from its decks and down its sides like thick dawn fog cascading downhill in the redwoods. Because the cargo is packed in dry ice, we insulate our jackets and shoes with newspaper before boarding. Working in the holds will be intensely cold. The shifts are one hour on, 45 minutes off to warm up, then back in for another  hour.  We crack open the deck hatches.  The liberated dry ice fog billows out in force. When it clears, we descend into the cold to work. But hell has not frozen over this day. This ship carries beer, ale, candy, and lobster tail. Hallelujah!