The Life and Times of Innis E. Coxman (22 page)

(Note: you always hear the term “drug pusher.”
While some
who sell illegal pleasures have been known to “push” in order to get people
hooked, I never subscribed to that practice. I never pushed anything on
anybody. Despite what you may think of me, I was a dealer with a morsel of
morality.)

***

I’m
going to tell you something a few people just won’t understand.
The most
straightforward “job title” I’ve ever held in my life? Drug Dealer. Crazy, I know.
I haven’t sold a narcotic in years, but the paradox of that livelihood still
floors me to this day.

It’s
no secret that the work holds grating factors. There’s deceit, treachery, the
possibility of being dimed to police, and the air of tension in a crowded room
from the presence of someone whose volatility is the stuff of legend. Aside
from all of
that,
there’s the omnipresent threat of having your head
blown off just by walking in the wrong house. However, when you subtract the
dangerous aspects of the biz and strip the game to its meat-and-potatoes, it’s
one of the more honest enterprises out there:

You
have products for sale.

There
is no shortage of customers who want said products.

Customers
locate you, the person who possesses said products.

The
customer gives you cash for one or many products.

You
give the buyer the product they’ve paid for without substituting baking soda
for the coke, oregano for the weed, or candy for the pills.

You
have profited from another’s cesspool of sadness and/or need for exhilaration.

That
leech goes forth into the world to smoke/shoot/snort/eat their product.

Aforementioned
leech eventually squanders their product.

Repeat.

Save
for prostitution, it’s the most scrupulous industry in the world.

Not
often, but occasionally, someone would come over to my place with no money and
a jones that can’t be understood until you see it. Pouring sweat like they just
ran a 10K in Hell; eyes glassy from the last intake of their preferred poison;
and they couldn’t keep still if somebody had threatened the life of their
firstborn.

I
had no qualms helping out a good customer. Depending on who it was, I’d give
them a taste for free just to ease the pain. Of course, my magnanimity was
conditional. It was quietly understood that I was to be reimbursed the next
time they came around for a purchase. Otherwise, our business was concluded.
(Didn’t matter. The city I lived in was full of drugs. If they burned me they
knew they could score somewhere else.)

It
goes without saying that if the individual had failed to pay me for previous
assistance, there was a middle finger and a 9mm shoved in their face. They were
on their own. Barring that, I’d do it. When I was in that viper’s pit of a
life, I’d ran out of drugs plenty of times myself and knew the discomfort of
withdrawal. However, if an honest customer came to me hurting, aching, and
needing just a couple of pills or a few lines to tide them over, I was never so
bastardly as to say, “Fuck you. That’s
your
problem.”

It’s
a damn shame the legitimate business world doesn’t share my charitable views.

***

I
was in a period of abstinence from narcotics. These spurts came around every so
often but never lasted more than six months. When I got tired of doing and
selling drugs, I’d clean up to pass a toxicology screen for employment.

It
was during one of these stretches that I went to work on boats. I don’t mean
that I constructed or tooled on them. I mean I worked
on
the boats. I
was a deckhand, employed by a company who ran tugboats on the Mississippi
River, and crew boats, whose main function was to pick up crews from or deliver
them
to
oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to these vessels,
the company had a fleet of supply boats that brought fresh materials to the
rigs and carted away soiled.....supplies.

The
business was started by a retired boat captain sometime in the mid-70s. His
first tugboat was similar to a real one in the sense that it wouldn’t sink in a
body of water. That’s it. By all accounts it was little more than a big raft
lashed together with hope and bubble gum. Over many lean years of scrimping,
saving, and securing lucrative contracts, he and his earlier employees began to
amass a parade of seaworthy crafts. Approximately twenty years after
The
Airy Flatulence
was christened into service, I filled out my application
for employment. By the time I went to work, the company had an impressive fleet
of over one-hundred-and-fifty vessels, becoming one of the premier offshore
suppliers in the world.         

***

I’d
be a liar if I said there were some aspects of the job I didn’t like, my
favorite of which was sunrise on the water.

My
shift was from midnight to noon. When a new day came around, I’d drop whatever
I was doing to bathe in the majesty. Depending on our direction, I’d post up at
port or starboard with a full mug of coffee, chainsmoking, leaning on the rail
and greeting the splendor with dolphins squealing just a short distance from my
footing. Sometimes we were tied to a rig, sometimes not. If we were in motion, I’d
remove my orange hardhat and let the breeze whip over my bald head as I awed at
nature’s free glory. Daybreak seemed to last forever out there. I’d lose track
of time staring at the wonderment, enraptured by one of God’s greatest
creations.

Poets
and authors use elaborate language to describe first blush for their readers.
Everybody has seen portrayals in film and television. But Lord, one never knows
how Heavenly the aurora can be until you’ve felt its warmth from the turquoise
waters of the Gulf.

I’d
never seen the rays of the sun until then. The birth of a new morning sent
everlasting beams of yellow slashing through cumulus clouds threatening to
dwarf its greatness. The coming light filtered through the atmosphere to glow
purple, blue, and orange over the water. Every morning in the middle of my
shift, I was reminded of how small we really are. All of us. We’re nothing
compared to the illustrious ball of energy that heats the Earth. I’m still
upset I never had a camera—that I didn’t have the talent to capture the moment
with paint on canvas. The breathtaking sunrises of the Gulf are what I remember
most about my time on the waves. They were the most unforgettable moments of
the experience.

Well,
that and plummeting fifteen feet to my near-death on the bow of a tugboat.

***

Everybody,
from new-hires to seasoned vets, wanted to work on the crew or supply boats,
leaving vacuums on the tugs. Instead of saying “No” to a portion of these
requests, the oh-so-knowledgeable heads of Human Resources tried to please all
the people all the time. And it worked: everybody was pleased except for guys
like me who were stripped of their beautiful sunrises and sent to work on the
goddamn tugboats in the Mighty Mississip’.

One
day I showed up to a satellite office in Laplace. I was shocked to learn that I
was going to be working on the river for a while. They told me I was going to
be a “swing man.” If I’d been in a fetish club, that shit would’ve been
awesome. But life is not Studio 54. The definition herein meant that I’d be in
the Gulf for a few hitches, but spend most of my time on the tuggers pushing
barges full of gravel or rotting corn. It was a demotion of sorts.

I
was standing in an executive’s office with my bag thrown over my shoulder when
I got the news. His name was Lonnie Langerhand and he was the owner’s
great-nephew. I was one-hundred-and-thirty pounds heavier, five inches taller,
a year older, and spoke three octaves lower than him. He was known throughout
the company as a sniveling little power monger.

I
asked him why I was being moved around. He never looked up from the papers on
his desk and dismissively said, “Shit rolls downhill, Innis. It’s just the way
it is.”

No
one had ever said that to me before. I didn’t like it. Not only am I not shit,
but if someone’s going to tell me that it needs to come harder than a Mickey
Mouse impersonation. I began to imagine Lonnie’s
head
rolling down a
hill and smiled at the vision. He interrupted my daydream when he added that
instead of my standard two weeks, I’d be out for three because the tugs ran at
a different schedule.

This
threw a monkey wrench in my plans.

“The
thing is, Lonnie, I can’t do that, man. I ran over some broken glass and nails
that one of your maintenance crews dropped in the parking lot. It flattened my
two front tires. I already called a mechanic here in town to ask him if he
could do anything. He said that he’d tow my car and have new tires mounted, but
that I’d have to pick it up as soon as I came in because he was leaving on
vacation the next day. He won’t be back for two weeks after that.”

Lonnie
looked up from his desk with annoyance. “What’s that got to do with me?”

I
could see he was pissed because I’d left little wonder as to who was responsible
for my punctured property. Thing is, I didn’t actually see the trucks do it.
Otherwise, I would’ve pitched a bitch and gone over his head to have the
company pay for my new Michelins. But I knew it was the yardhands; everybody
from the captains to the office secretary knew they dropped shit in the lot all
the time.

Whatever.
Oompa Loompas could’ve slashed my tires and it still wouldn’t have changed the
fact that I had a major issue.

“Dude,
do you see my problem? I only have a day to get my ride back before he leaves.
I’d planned on being out two weeks and that’s what I told him. If I’m gone for
three, that puts me stranded here for seven days waiting for him to get back
from his vacation. How in the hell am I supposed to get home?” Laplace is about
thirty miles west of New Orleans,
one-hundred-and-eighty miles away
from
where I lived at the time.

That
smug cocksucker snorted and looked at me like I’d come to have an in-depth
conversation about the color of the new office carpet.

Without
a hint of pity, he said, “That’s your problem. Now get on the tug, Coxman.”
 

Your mama can tug my Coxman, motherfucker.

The
boat was waiting for me at the dock about a hundred yards from the office. I
stomped down the stairs, cursing the whole way. I threw my bag on the planks
first, then climbed aboard. The other deckhand was leaning on the rail
stern-side smoking a Black & Mild. I introduced myself and we untied the
ropes.

I
was in a pickle. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but apparently I had
three weeks to think about it. The diesel engines rumbled to life to take us
down the choppy fall current.

***

Two
weeks in.

I’d
spent fourteen days on the river and I still had a situation to deal with once
we made it back to land for crew change. It was fine; at least then I’d be away
from a drunkard steering inestimable tons of metal and a man who made my skin
crawl. Fretting as I was over lodging and transportation, my mental condition
was worsened by a boat captain who took nips from a silver flask and a deckhand
who, evidently, had just been released from a ten-year prison stretch for
drugging men in gay bars and raping them in their homes (I slept in my cabin
with the door locked and chained). How in the hell either one of these guys
were hired to work in one of the most hazardous fields on the planet still
beats the shit out of me.

It
was a sunny afternoon near New Orleans. We were “making up tow,” which in
layman’s terms means we were tying barges together for a delivery down river.
At times, a tugboat can push up to a dozen barges to its destination. For this
trip, we were moving eight. I think they contained beans and sand.

Making
up tow is a painstaking, dangerous process. I always compared it to piecing a
jigsaw puzzle with rusty containers. It goes like so:

The
tug picking up the order arrives at a dock to find a collection of barges that
have been deposited by another crew. It’s their job to ferret through the mass
and pick out which ones to haul. This is done by jibing the identifying numbers
painted on the barges with the manifest. Once the paperwork and markings are in
sync, the captain opens full throttle to close the gap between the bow and a
lateral side of a random barge, gunning the engine to hold his position when
necessary. Then the
morons
deckhands hike up
steps located on the bow with barge ropes slung over their shoulders. At the
top is a platform about four-feet-by-four-feet, give or take. A pole jutting
skyward from the center of the platform is used as a buttress while waiting for
the boat to position itself. When the bumpers of the tug are flush, leaving no
crevices for a man to fall through, they step to the deck of the barge with
their ropes and pray they make it.