Yours Truly in a Swamp

by

Leonard Earl Johnson

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Dedicated to Daniel Murphy, 1964 - 1999

Cyberpal on the NPR.org Impeachment Board

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From La Porte, Texas to The Promised Land

Les Amis Index

 
The year of the Great Cuban Boatlift I was a crewmember aboard the US flagged "Sealand Adventure," a container ship on a regular  run, with stops, between Houston and Rotterdam.  During that year she quit the wharves along Houston's downtown Ship Channel and began calling at a new container terminal, near La Porte, Texas, and so far out in the boonies it was barely in from the Gulf of Mexico.

The Houston Port's decision to move their container service to La Porte was -- and still is -- a great thorny urchin in the belly of thirsty sailors.  Now, mind you, near the new terminal there existed a dirt-floored, tin-roofed watering hole called the Little Goat Ranch.  It sat promisingly along the turn at Barber's Cut, on a beachhead that was easy walking distance from the ship's new berth.  The Little Goat Ranch's services were mercifully available twenty four hours a day.

La Porte, a meager destination if ever there was one, was two miles straight inland.  It was a pleasant two miles, by bicycle over deserted asphalt roads laid between cow pastures dotted with moss-strewn Live Oaks.  But the town offered its visitors little.  Only The Space Shot Motel & Bar, a closed Spanish movie house, Rosita's Fajita Café, and one very large Gulf Coast Hobby Emporium, with a lighted plastic sign proclaiming "Lionel Trains for All The Ages," greeted Sailors home from The Sea.  

The Little Goat Ranch and the dim lights of La Porte were certainly appreciated, but they were not Houston.

One blue Spring morn, I walked into the Hobby Emporium and met Cowboy Castro, a fine looking blue-eyed, brown-skinned local, with a not so fine looking purple "pick'm up truck."  Among its dents and scratches, the truck boasted a plastic Jesus holding a bleeding red heart in one hand and a chromium pigtail radio antenna in the other.  This Texas new age Jesus stood one and a half feet high, on the left front fender.  Cowboy was in the Emporium purchasing tiny red lights for this icon, "to light the world through the eyes of Jesus!"  I hired him on the spot to drive me back to the ship, and, with my bicycle secured in the truck's bed, we followed the red-eyed beacon of Jesus back to the Goat Ranch.

That night, still at the Goat Ranch, the Mate, Boson, Chief Cook, and I retained Cowboy to regularly meet our ship and drive one or all of us into Houston; then round us up, gurgling in the morning light, and return us dockside -- and, if need be, help us stumble up the accommodation ladder .

Our arrangement went well.  Houston was an alabaster city undulating on a deep pool of booming oil prices; an anything goes Babylon of the oil patch.  Cowboy Castro's purple pick'm up
became the magic carpet that carried us there.  Shore leave again was liberty for all; and, despite his youth, religiosity, and being on Summer break from Texas A. & M., Cowboy performed his duties well, in time joining us in port and out of La Porte.

Our favorite Houston destination was a long gray building along Westheimer Drive called the Green Door.  Neon tubing atop its flat roof showed huge chicken heads kissing among flashing red hearts and green dollar signs.  Under this sign a row of green doors waited along a low slung front porch.  Beside each door hung a red lantern similar to those used by old-time railroaders.  If the railroader's lamp was lighted, you could enter for a price and talk privately with a scantily clad man or woman behind the plate glass window.  By the power vested in money pushed through the slot, you could persuade your selection to display further charms.  It was living porno.  Shocking, perhaps, but with the possible exception of  Cowboy, we were depraved Salts and not missionaries.

Truthfully, Cowboy loved the Green Door and always arrived screaming Biblical quotes like, " 'tis better to spill your seed in the belly of the whore than upon barren rock!"  Then he would enter one of the doors labeled "One Girl" and, as he put it, "wax philosophic with the Jezebel inside."

Back at the ship one night, I suggested he join me in my fo'c's'le for a drink.  After several, we passed out, awakening next morning on deck, under my bunk, the ship rocking gently as it slipped out into the Gulf of Mexico.  Cowboy quickly grasped our situation and was not happy.  "I've been shanghaied!" he hollered, cursing in Spanish and throwing Lone Star Beer cans first at the Gulf of Mexico on the other side of the porthole, and then at me.

 I hollered back, "Don't blame me, you Bible thumping Aggie, I sure don't want a stowaway in my cabin, for Christ's sake!"  

The word "stowaway" brought us both up short and sober.  We stopped fretting and agreed to make the best of our situation till reaching Miami in two days.  It was vital that Cowboy get off the ship in Miami.  It was our last Stateside stop before heading across the North Atlantic to Rotterdam.

Certain he could walk off the ship in Miami and catch a plane back to Houston with no one the wiser, we settled in and became comfortable traveling companions.  He stayed calmly in my room drinking beer, watching television, and feasting on food spirited from the galley.  He talked whimsically of his family's immigration from Cuba, "before the rise of Fidel," and wondered aloud if he might "see the crimson isle," when we sailed the Straits of Florida.  I reckoned not.

South of  New Orleans, which sits in a hole below Sea level,  we picked up Baton Rouge television, and saw film of the huge Mariel Boat Lift washing onto the beaches of Florida.  Cowboy laughed at Florida's "gringo governor" greeting Cuban boat people while literally mopping his brow.  Then Cowboy's eyes lit up like the red-eyed Jesus on his purple truck.  "Caramba!" he exclaimed.  "If I could pass myself off as a boat person, I could slap-slogan Commie-hatin' Florida all the way to easy street."

I was shocked and said so.  "How could you, after fleeing Castro?"

"Fleeing Castro?"  He peered at me with a prove-it expression and  asked, "Are you crazy?"  That Castro was barely in from the hills when we left Cuba.  This Castro, he said, pointing his thumbs at his chest, was a babe in arms.  We were fleeing poverty.  I still am …"  

As Cowboy was saying this, I felt the ship slow, then go dead in the water.  I left him plotting his economic salvation and went topside.  The Mate and Boson were walking back from a Jacob's ladder slung over the starboard gunnel.  Six sunburned Cubans walked behind them.  Off the stern, an unpainted rowboat with an upended oar sluiced in our wake.  From the oar flapped a white cloth painted with black letters, spelling "SOS."  

I followed the Mate and Boson, waiting outside the captain's door till they came back out.  "Excuse me," I said, "but could one of you come with me?"  Both declined.

"Not with the fight I'm gonna' have with that drunken Steward over six extra rooms," said the Boson, turning off towards the crew's quarters.  The six Cubans followed close on his heels.

The Mate said, "Sorry, Leonard, but I've got Federal paper work to shuffle."

"You better," I said rubbing my beard and relishing the power of mystery, "we're in waters rough enough to beach us."  The thing was, any ship's irregularity meant paper work for the Mate, and the Mate hated paper work.  At my fo'c's'le, I opened the door.  "Hi, Mate," Cowboy grinned, lifting his beer can.

"Jesus Christ in a pick up truck!" exclaimed the Mate, while slamming the door tight.

 In Miami, officers of the United States Coastguard collected our seven Cubans, their number having grown by addition of the youthful, handsome, un-sunburned Cowboy.

On return from Rotterdam, there was no Cowboy to greet our ship.  Eight months, and as many trips passed, then on the day after Christmas, tumbling down the ladder, heading for the Goat Ranch, Cowboy drove up in a brand new, air-conditioned pick'm up truck.

"The new truck's blue," Cowboy explained on the drive into Houston, "because they had no purple ones."  He laughed, slapped his leg, and laughed some more, telling us how the Miami VFW had bought him the truck.

"And the last Gringo Governor of Florida," he laughed, "got me an appointment to the National Maritime Academy, at Kings Point."  He grinned and handed the Mate a Lone Star.  "I start in the Fall, then I'll be sailing with you legal like."

The Mate popped the beer, rolled down his window, and screamed a wild Texas "Wa-hoo!" at three cows idly chewing on a discarded Christmas Tree.  "God bless us all," he said, pulling his head back in the cab, "God bless us all, and welcome to The Promised Land!"

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Copr. 1999, Leonard Earl Johnson