Christmas near New Orleans

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The year of the last Cuban Boatlift I sailed aboard the S.S. ZEALAND ADVENTURE, a U.S. flagged container ship on a scheduled run between New Orleans and Rotterdam, with various other ports of call along the way.

During that year she quit the wharves on Houston's downtown Ship Channel and began calling at a new container terminal at Morgan's Point, near La Porte, Texas, a spot so far out in the boonies it was barely in from the Gulf of Mexico.

The Port of Houston's decision to move their container service to Morgan's Point was -- and still is -- a great thorny urchin in the belly of thirsty sailors everywhere. Now, mind you, near this new terminal existed a dirt-floored, tin-roofed watering hole known as the Little Goat Ranch. It sat promisingly on the turn at Barber's Cut, along a beachhead easy walking distance from the new berth, and its services were mercifully available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. A hand lettered sign over the back bar read, "We Never Cloze."

La Porte, a meager destination if ever there was one, lay two miles straight inland. I took a bicycle with me to Sea in those days, and It was a pleasant two miles by bicycle over deserted black asphalt roads separating cow pastures dotted with huge moss strewn oaks and long horned cattle. The town itself offered sailors little. There was a Safeway Super Market, the Space Shot Motel & Bar, a Spanish movie house, Rosetta's Fajita Café, and a very large Gulf Coast Hobby Emporium, with a back-lighted plastic sign proclaiming "Lionel Trains for All The Ages -- Toot! Toot!"

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

One golden day, in the Gulf Coast Hobby Emporium I made the acquaintance of Cowboy Castro, a nice looking blue-eyed, brown-skinned local, with a not so fine looking purple "pick'em up truck." Crowning the truck's left fender, amid a lifetime's worth of dents and scratches, stood a two foot plastic Jesus holding a bleeding red heart in one hand and a chromium pigtail radio antenna in the other. 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. With bicycle secured in his truck bed, we followed the red-eyed beacon of Jesus back to the Little Goat Ranch.

That night (still at the Goat Ranch) the Mate, Bos'on, 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 pool of booming oil prices, an anything goes Babylon of the U. S. Gulf Coast. Cowboy Castro's purple pick'em up was our magic carpet carrying us there. Shore leave was again liberty!

Despite his professed religiosity and being on Summer break from Texas A. & M., Cowboy performed his duties well, and in time joined 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 chicken heads kissing among flashing red hearts and green dollar signs. 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 lamp was lit green you could enter for a price and talk privately with a scantily clad man or woman behind a plate glass window. By the power vested in money pushed through a slot in the glass you could persuade your selection to display further charms. It was living porn. 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, "Better to spill your seed in the belly of the whore than upon barren rock!" He would enter a door labeled "One Girl" and, as he put it, "wax philosophic with the Jezebel inside."

Back at the ship one night, he helped me up the ladder and joined me in my fo'c's'le for a drink. After several we passed out. We awakened on the deck rocking against the bulkhead beside my bunk, as the ship gently slipped out to Sea.

"I've been shanghaied!" Cowboy hollered. He cursed in Spanish and threw Lone Star beer cans, first at the Gulf of Mexico on the other side of the porthole, and then at me.

I yelled back, "Don't blame me, you Bible thumping Aggie, I 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 he 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 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 cabin drinking beer, watching television, and feasting on food I spirited from the galley. We talked of lonely holidays at Sea and how Norwegian sailors lashed evergreen trees to their ship's foremast at Christmas time. He told of his family's immigration from Cuba, "before Fidel," and wondered if he might see the "Crimson Isle," when we sailed through the Straits of Florida. I reckoned not.

Passing south of New Orleans, which sits in a hole below Sea level, we picked up Baton Rouge television and watched news film of the huge Mariel Boat Lift washing onto the beaches of south 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 pass myself off as a boat-person, I can slap-slogan stupid 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 said, "Are you crazy?

"That Castro was hardly in from the hills when we left Cuba. This Castro, he said, pointing his thumbs at his chest, was a baby. 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 Bos'on were walking back from a Jacob's ladder slung over the starboard gunnels. Six sunburned Cubans walked behind them. Off our stern, an unpainted rowboat with an upended oar sluiced in our wake. From the oar flapped a white cloth painted with black letters spelling, "S. O. S."

I followed them and waited 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 going to have with that drunken Steward over six extra rooms," said the Bos'on. He turned off towards the crew's quarters. The six Cubans trotted close on his heels.

The Mate shrugged, "Sorry, Leonard, but I've got Federal papers to shuffle."

"You best," I said rubbing my beard and cherishing the powers of mystery. "We are in waters rough enough to beach us."

He came with me.

The power of my mystery was that any ship's irregularity meant paper work for the Mate, and all Mates hate paper work. At my fo'c's'le I turned the latch and stood back.

"Hi, Mate," Cowboy grinned, lifting his beer can.

"Jesus, Moses and all the saints!" exclaimed the Mate, slamming the door tight. "Holy Mother of Christ!"

In Miami, officers of the United States Coastguard collected our Cubans, now numbering seven with the addition of youthful, handsome, un-sunburned Cowboy Castro.

During our return voyage we lashed a Norwegian Christmas Tree to the foremast and strung it with yellow light bulbs furnished by the Bos'on. We hove round Barber's Cut and slipped up against the wharf. All eyes searched the dock, but there was no waiting Cowboy. We used his keys and drove ourselves into Houston for Christmas Day. Then, two days after Christmas, as we tumbled down the ladder headed for the Goat Ranch, Cowboy drove up in a brand new, air-conditioned pick'em up truck.

"The new truck's blue," Cowboy explained on the drive into Houston, "because they had no purple."

He laughed, slapped his leg and laughed again telling how the Miami V. F. W. had bought him the truck and "The gringo governor got me an appointment to the National Maritime Academy at Kings Point."

He grinned and handed the Mate a Lone Star. "I start next Fall, then I'll be sailing with you legal like."

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