The Andrew Fletcher
By Rossi

I still can’t recall what it was that gave me the courage to walk on
board the Andrew Fletcher that afternoon in 1984. I’d been bartending in a hole-in-the-wall joint called “Humpty’s” for a year, but the place had closed. Seems the second the money ran dry, the partners started to hate each other. Funny how that works.

As an aside, may I add that bartending can be stressful enough, but on a boat?

Now back to me. As a child, I’d been known to get seasick on a swing. The day I nearly threw up from watching two kids on a seesaw, I knew I had a little more than a motion-sickness problem; the Godzilla of equilibrium issues was stomping around my insides.

The lady in the ticket booth at South Street Seaport told me there’d be a 20-minute gap between cruises. I’d popped a Dramamine and raced down the gangway and onto the deck in search of some guy named Alan.

A toothless man with a Cockney accent directed me: “Pasty bloke, you’ll find ’im on the upper deck!”

I walked to the rear, or, um, the bow? Never did the hang of boat lingo … and climbed the back stairs. A rather frightened-looking man with thick glasses was walking along the top deck, talking to himself.

“Are you Alan?”

“When I have to be.”

“I’m looking for a bartending job.”

He sized me up, a smile creeping across his face.

“We’re about to leave on an hour-and-a-half cross up and down the East River. Stay for the cruise, check out the bar action, and we’ll talk when we dock back at the seaport.”

With that, he spun around and walked away.

I popped another Dramamine.

The Andrew Fletcher was a large, Mississippi River Boat replica that
ran short cruises for tourists during the day and rock’n’roll cruises
for aging yuppies at night. The slow, even ride felt more like being on a train than a boat. Even I could have skipped the seasickness pills.

After the second one took hold, I was so stoned I could barely keep my eyes open. When the Statue of Liberty came into view, I swear she waved.

I tottered downstairs and watched two harried women try to keep up with the long line at the bar.

Most of the crowd were tourists. They were easy to spot in their I
(Heart) New York T-shirts; actual NewYorkers would eat glass before wearing one of those things.

The bar was well stocked with liquor, but they all wanted beer, soda
and chips. Giant oilcans of Foster’s were the biggest seller, maybe
because a normal drinker could just finish one on a 90-minute cruise. Were there any “normal drinkers” on board, that is.

The older of the two bartenders, had reddish-brown hair, and her ivory white skin was flushed red, as well.

In a heavy Irish accent, she bellowed. “Come on man … where’s my ice!” at a teenage boy. Her name was Adeen, and she was the head bartender.

The younger woman could have been pretty younger cousin to the first. She didn’t have an accent but looked as Irish. Her name was Ellen and she was the junior bartender.

The powers that be on the Andrew Fletcher liked men at the helm, men managing the boat and men as deck hands, but they were partial to women behind the bar.

“They like to see ladies suffer,” Adeen later opined. “Most men do.”

The cruise complete, the boat docked again with a resounding thud, part of Captain Dan’s sense of humor.

“He likes to scare the tourists,” said Alan, who’d appeared at my side.
“It’s what gets him up in the morning.”

I watched at the red-faced beer drinkers, the old ladies, the giddy
children and the Japanese tourists pile down the gangway. A line for
the next cruise was already forming and had snaked its was down the pier to the ticket booth.

“I hate summer, “Alan said.

“So, um, about the job…”

“Do you have experience?”

“Yes, a year as head bartender at Humpty’s on 73rd and York, graduated from the International School of Bartending and …”

“I never met a bartender who went to bartending school.”

“I know. I get that all the time. … ”

“Come back tomorrow at 9,” he said.

“Tomorrow?”

“You’ll need khaki pants; we’ll give you the Andrew Fletcher shirt.”

“So I got the job?”

“The better question is, will you want the job?”

***

My first day on board The Fletcher, I served up a whole lot more Cape Cod-style potato chips then anything else.

Sandy, the president of Seaport Lines, was a dry, humorless man with a abundance of warty growths on his face. With little on top and perpetually pink skin, he looked like a pencil eraser as he came
aboard.

In Sandy’s mind, the Andrew Fletcher docked in Hyannis, not Manhattan.

We poured Cape Codders (vodka and cranberry) and doled out bags of “Cape Cod Chips,” which no one had heard of back then. Rather than beers, we displayed an array of lagers. Were it not for the expense, we surely would have shucked Wellfleet oysters.

In our khaki pants and navy blue preppie shirts, we might have passed as respectable, until Captain Dan came screaming down the deck chasing his toothless first mate. … It was best that Sandy visited as little as he did.

I was branded the outsider at first, partly because I was new,
partially because I wasn’t Irish, but mostly because I didn’t drink
beer. Beer, as it turned out, or better yet, Guinness, was an essential
part of socializing with those whom I would later call “the boat
people.”

I came to understand the world of difference between land folk and boat people.

For one, boat people, stuck together. As the thousands and thousands of tourists would dwindle, the boat people would crawl from their galleys, wheel towers and top decks and meet at either Macduffy’s or Carmine’s.

Macduffy’s was tucked inside what felt like a secret alleyway in the
old part of South Street Seaport. Boat people deemed the new part, the Pier 17 shopping mall, an abomination. That is until one of the deck hands got a job pouring Dark and Tans on its top floor.

Once the manager was off-duty, the mall was considered an abomination with good free draft.

Carmine’s, which thankfully has weathered the mall-ification of the
Seaport, still stands. Whether or not it will survive the South Street
fishing market being booted up to the Bronx, I can’t say, but the
delicious dive has a secret I learned only by hanging with the boat
people. Its wildest happy hour was from 5 to 7. In the morning.

At first I didn’t believe it when John, Adeen’s beau at the time, said
he had the hottest shift in the seaport, stepping in when the night
boys went home at 4 a.m. But as it turned out, the fishermen’s “day”
ended right about then, and they were ready to party.

It’s an odd sensation to get off work at 2, walk thru the empty
seaport, which reeked of old fish, to join a loud and motley crew at
Macduffy’s, then join a virtual parade to the 5 a.m. drinking frenzy at Carmine’s.

I stood out, and not just because I was the only person ordering white wine. I was, to my knowledge, the only Jew in the crowd and the only gay person, or at least the only one who would admit it.

Adeen had taken me under her wing, and when I came out to her, she had the most unusual response. She smiled broadly and screamed, “Oh how delightful!” then called over her cousin Fiona.

“Fiona!” she screamed. “Young Rossi here likes the ladies!” to which
Fiona screamed back, “Lovely!”

Adeen later announced to a completely blasted crowd at Macduffy’s,
“She’s my friend and screw you all if you don’t like her!”

Word gets around. Captain Dan stepped up to the bar the next day for a fill-up of his Coke, which meant one part Coke to three parts Jack Daniels.

“Hey crazy lady … anytime you want a lady, come by my cabin. I got one ready for ya!” he said.

Captain Dan was beloved by one and all for his wild cowboy ways and the fact that he’d fallen in love with a stripper who looked like Jane Mansfield. He’d hidden her in his cabin for a week, delighting all the deck hands with her occasional drunken live performances.

Dan worked two weeks on and two weeks off, during which time Captain Virgil would step in, and we’d all wish we had life insurance. Captain Virgil had already grounded the boat once. He only drank wine coolers but couldn’t hold those, possibly because he weighed all of 100 pounds.

***
The day I showed up for work and saw a larger, showier riverboat
replica docked next to our somewhat bedraggled Fletch, I knew life as we’d known it was about to change.

They called our sister ship the Dewitt Clinton.

She was taller then the Fletch, and bore a cadre of
just-out-of-college, pretending-to-be-important junior managers. She offered weekend jazz cruises and private parties that finally drew the upper crust New England-style crowd Sandy had dreamed of.

Brian McCallister of those McCallister tugboats you see putting around with big M’s on the side, was a big-time investor in Seaport Lines. We knew this because every time he came on board, the large-and-in-charge junior manager of the moment would run up to us screaming, “Brian is coming!” as if it were Jesus himself.

One of the bar-backs, the lowest rung on the boat people employment ladder, was a good-looking young man, just out of high school. We taunted him endlessly about his dad, but the truth was, we were impressed to see the McCallister boy hauling trash.

My favorite thing about tending bar on the boats was Ellen, she was my partner, the yin to my yang, the Cher to my Sonny. As a rock’n’roll cruise began, she and I would turn to face the line of 300 yuppies, but the time we got to the end of that line, the cruise was over, and another 300 yuppies were waiting at the dock.

You had to keep a sense of humor, or drink. We did a bit of both.

We got so fast during those cruises that I’d toss her the vodka without thinking, hearing her customer order a screwdriver from some part of my brain. She’d pour peach schnapps into my cup without being asked, hearing from some part of her brain the secretary in front of me askin for a fuzzy navel.

Yes, it was the summer of peach schnapps, and no one could get enough of it. Fuzzy navels, sex on the beach, woo woos -- it was downright ridiculous.

I never got used to the sight of a 300-pound man saying, “I’d like a
woo woo please” in a baritone.

Ellen and I mixed sarcasm with each drink we poured.

“The bloke would like a woo woo,” she’d say in a bad British accent.

“Shall we tickle him, then?” I’d answer back.

“Nah. … ’e’d like that, he would, make him all peachy.”

You’d think we would make a fortune, pouring drinks for 900 or so
customers a night, but the tourists and the Wall Streeters were cheap. They only left their change. If their drink cost $2.75, they’d leave the quarter. Life got a whole lot better when the Seaport Lines raised drink prices to $3.25.

Ellen and I still managed to make our $200, sometimes $300 a night … in quarters. Same job on dry land would have landed us well in the green.

I’d just gotten used to the Clinton and the late-night jazz. My
favorite of which was when I followed Tito Puente into the seaport as he chanted, “Got to get fish for my wife.”

I’d been pouring him Remy and Cokes all night long, just to say I hung with the great Tito Puente, but in the early morning darkness, Tito was just a chubby man trying to keep his wife happy. I liked that.

Then Restaurant Associates arrived. The corporate restaurant giant had been hired on a trial basis to take over Seaport Lines.

Seems our ragtag crew, the Fosters oilcans gone missing and a drunken fight or two too many had made The Pencil, a k a Sandy, think we needed to bring in the big guns. It might also have been the ladies’ underwear hanging out to dry on the top deck.

The big guns sent a short, fat, bearded man who looked like a nerdy
turtle. I immediately thought of him as Turtle and have completely
forgotten his name.

Turtle introduced an anti-theft system. After every shift, our cups
were counted. If the money in the register didn’t match the number of missing cups, the difference came out of our pay. A kid asking for a cup of water might cost us five bucks

“Scram, kid,” we told the water mongers after that.

Turtle also added nachos with gooey cheese to the bar menu. Which we were told to hawk for 3 bucks a bowl. The cheese always smelled like melted plastic, and it never, ever seemed to wipe off the bar.

Turtle had a passion for flight attendants, and brought in three to
work the bar with us. Ellen jumped ship at first sight of the nacho
dispenser, and Adeen went to find work as a lawyer. Yeah, it freaked me out too. The Irish babe who’d been opening Fosters alongside me for the last three years was an attorney.

This left me alone with the stewardesses, who with their frosted hair, foundation, perfume, push up bras and gold hoop earrings made me feel like, well, the guy.

“Hon … would you pick that up for me?” they’d ask. “My nail polish is still wet.”

The stewardesses didn’t last. Neither did Restaurant Associates.

Seaport Lines went back to running its own show after that. I’d like to say it improved things, but the boat higher ups had managed to keep the large-and-in-charge junior managers from RA, who were really the worst part.

They did ditch the nachos, but nothing short of a Titanic-style soak
would have removed the stench of old cheese from the bar. To this day, I’ve wondered about our hapless customers and the indigestible cheese-plastic lining their innards.

I spent my last year with Seaport Lines bartending on the top deck.
With the crisp breeze and the gorgeous lights whizzing by, I didn’t let the little things get me down. The little things being a major
testosterone-a-zation of the bar. Seems whoever took over the helm from The Pencil wasn’t so fond of women on boats.

The day they gave the new boys all my best shifts and sent me back to doling out chips and sodas to the daytime crowd, I knew I was done. Not a nice way to repay years of near-servitude by a head bartender, which I’d been since Adeen left.

That year, they gave us Seaport Lines T-shirts instead of Christmas bonuses.

Late at night, Adeen would buy Ellen and me rounds at Macduffy’s with her lawyer paycheck. Ellen had married Joe, who liked his women not to work; she was only too happy to oblige.

Everything had changed, but I didn’t let it get to me that last early
fall in the seaport. I knew I had one thing that no one could ever take from me.

After five years on the Seaport Lines, I’d become a boat person, even if I still got sick on swings.

It was in my soul like the scent of nacho cheese and the calling of
passing boats. I was, I am, a boat person. And you can shove that
peach schnapps up your woo woo.