“I had a job bein’ a mystery man for a while,” he told us. “I was in this comic strip—remember Brenda Starr?”

Raf’s vita—what a notion. He’d had all types of tough-guy jobs, the kind they build beer and shaving-razor ads around. He’d been a foundry worker. He was still a member of the steelworkers’ union. And a waterman. He fished for lobster out of Seaforth, Mass., for a season. He’d been a smoke jumper in California, and a bouncer at the Las Vegas Sands. He had cut and hung sheet rock for a Baltimore apartment complex.

There was only one condition Raf put on accepting a job. He would sign on to any crew doing anything, provided he could get away with drinking while he worked. Risk or pay ran a faraway second place in his calculations.

He used to report home from the Baymoth Brass Foundry all slickered with sweat and a coat of filth—total blackface—and reeking even more of bourbon than of the roasted-metal foundry smell.

The fishing job was his worst. He had met the captain, a twenty-year-old father of three, in a Wasnascawa saloon. That was deep New England winter, and the next morning Raf had gone out on a ship called the Tiger’s Ass.

Raf told me they hadn’t been five minutes clear of the harbor, had just sighted Boston Light, when the kid captain said, “Bad wethah due, time to rock ’n’ roll.” Which meant break out the Irish.

Raf said there were no more woozy death-cheating days in his life than those he spent on the tilting frozen deck of the Tiger’s Ass, trying to get the iced nets untangled with iced fingers.

“What nobody realizes,” he said, “is those guys are sick all the fuckin’ time. Puke sick all day, all night. Like when the bed’s circling. That was everyday life, only if I fell off the whirling bed it was, you know, the watery-grave deal.

“Me and two wino Portuguese and the Irish kid, going out under hurricane warnings. The kid thought the Atlantic was like a freeway—chancy, but, what the fuck, let’s go.

“We didn’t know what we were doing. With the deck all greasy from the oil spraying outa the air compressor and engines. And everything with the stench of oil; whatever lunch you could force down or what you drank tasted of diesel. And every surface was already slippery from ice and seawater and drek and then add oil.