Trial By Fire With Billy Boat-School

In homage to an old friend who got married a few weeks ago, I am getting off my ass, dusting off my brain that once recreated so freely (and the ol' Billy Blog it tended), and cranking out one last nostalgic entry for the mostly-abandoned 2015, in hopes that 2016 will be a more entertaining, less end-of-graduate-school-and-start-of-new-grownup-job-dominated year.

This one's for you, Billy Boat-School.

***

When we first met, Billy Boat-School was a scrabbling liveaboard who'd just set his sights on the then-distant goal of a captain's license. He had a tiny little sloop whose mast was lashed in a firmly horizontal position on its deck, and he lived on it, anchored out in a bay overlooked by the lovely Saint Thomas dump.

Billy Boat-School was one of about a dozen ragtag pupils enrolled in a three-day US Coast Guard training course required of all crew wishing to work in the boating world of actual paying commercial passengers, and I ended up seated next to him on the first day. I, for my part, was still fresh on Delirium, with one stormy 72-hour trans-Caribbean passage with Billy Basso and Ginger and a lot of sunny day-sailing and snorkeling with Billy Billionaire under my belt, a great deal of excitement about my still-new life afloat, and little else. As far as boat trash go, we were both fairly wide-eyed and young. And, in this transient environment largely devoid of attractive here-and-now social options, he was a good-looking Billy in my same demographic who clearly understood the wanderer's urge. Of course I sat next to him.

Let me back up a sec: this is not a "class" in the organized, sensibly-administered sense you might infer, just based on the fact it's ostensibly overseen by a uniformed force under the US Department of Defense. No, no, no. This a class I'm taking in the islands. What this means, for anyone who has never lived the uniquely amusing-to-hellish spectrum of the experience of doing business in the lesser Antilles is that - and this is both a singular fact, and also applicable as a metaphor useful in the broader contextual sense - it was not searchable on the internet.

This is because the islands are a different world when it comes to getting things done. Just for example, in order to get here I've hopped two separately exciting rides on the island-wide "dollar bus" system, which is comprised of a fleet of trucks driven by Rastas with seats bolted into their beds and is classifiable as a "system" by only the most relaxed island standards. Also for example, I've been chased down the street at my stop by a pack of islander schoolchildren laughingly screaming "CRACKER!" at me. Also for example, I've been initially misdirected to a dilapidated building on the wrong end of the property, where the only occupants are little green lizards swarming the stone walls. I've put in a decent amount of effort just to arrive at this training (all the while building up blog fodder for days), and none of this is particularly special, is what I'm saying. In the islands, you are just as likely to go through a similar obstacle course of acrobatics in patience and problem-solving trying to buy a pair of shoelaces or something else you'd consider mundane and ubiquitous in the non-islands universe. Just for example.

The first day of the course was dedicated to Marine Medical First Responder training, and featured a local "medic" who offered a downright alarming number of firsthand stories of people in her social circle and professional purview becoming seriously injured or suffering progressively worsening conditions under her misguided care. In summary, I would not have picked her for my survival team.

(Yesterday's takeaway.)

Enter today's instructor.

The guy's name is Len. He is wiry and dirty and wears the almost-obligatory Harley Davidson do-rag and greasy grey ponytail, stone-washed jeans completely ripped out in the ass, and features a constant cigarette. You've met this Billy a million times at gas stations and carnivals all across the country. This is that Billy whose "ol' lady," when he has one, sports an identical ol' lady-version of his same voice and ponytail.

Len is the island's Fire Expert, and he begins the second of our three days of instruction for the internationally-mandated STCW, or "Standards of Training, Certification, and Watchkeeping" session on maritime fire safety and suppression by shuffling up to the front of the room, flashing a yellow smile, and welcoming us to the "Stupid Things the Coast Guard Wants" class.

Much as our trainer yesterday largely exemplified, in her true-story illustrations, exactly how bad a medical situation can turn if everything is done wrong, Len has a grab-bag of personal backwoods pyromania disasters which he divulges throughout the day. Billy Boat-School and I have an increasingly hard time keeping straight faces: both The Angel of Death (who had to be gently corrected on the difference between venous and arterial bleeding by a classmate who just couldn't take it any more) and The Firestarter are oblivious to the irony of their own causative involvement in all these firsthand accounts of Things Gone Horrifically Wrong. Tragic isn't exactly the word I'm looking for, but it'll do. 

(*To his credit and in contrast with Day One's happenings, Len at least didn't come back from lunch drunk and supremely high on his day to teach. This is the sort of gold star for exemplary performance one can expect to receive in the islands.)

Anyway, we spend the first half of the day dozing to firefighter training videos created by Texas A&M and aimed at crewmembers on oil tankers, and then for the second half of the day, Len calls for a van to take us to the Saint Thomas dump for hands-on suppression practice.

On his way out of the classroom, Len tucks an oil-stained cardboard box piled high with professional teaching materials (by "teaching materials," I of course mean emergency flares, full lighter fluid jugs, leaking paint thinner bottles, and the like) under his arm, accidentally knocking his lit cigarette out of his mouth in the process. Billy Boat-School and I both see this and reactively glance at each other with eyebrows raised in alarm. One single exasperated "fuck" escapes Len's lips as he fishes, seemingly endlessly, through the bottom of the box for his glowing Camel before finally retrieving it, shrugging, and taking another drag as he ducks out the door as if nothing noteworthy had just happened.

(Well this class just heated up.)

It's time to start some fires.

At the dump, it's tropical-summer hot out and there is no shade. This, Len says with a laugh that disintegrates into a 30-year smoker's hack, is because the charred framework of a former shade structure, which he points out a small distance behind our current training site, had just recently become a casualty of an overzealous day of practice-fires. Billy Boat-School shoulders me and I nod, because this is the sort of self-written joke you don't even have to verbalize to a person of standard intelligence: of course the Fire Expert burned down the training site. By this time, we're both wearing paper safety-masks so at least we can smile openly without appearing rude or frightened.

Len is now in his element. He dramatically sloshes diesel fuel from shoulder-height into an upturned car hood, wipes his now-covered hands on his jeans, and holds an acetylene torch flame to the surface of the pool until it hits its flashpoint and ignites. Then he turns, bounds toward us with a manic grin, and tosses the still-lit torch on the ground. Its hose, ending in an invisible flame hissing from its nozzle, is very close to the plastic can of remaining diesel fuel, and pointed straight at it. Billy Boat-School again nudges me, and we just look at each other. Behind his mask, I'm pretty sure Billy Boat-School's mouth is wide open. Mine is.

(It's just that I never pictured myself actually physically exploding.)

So now we are all to take turns advancing on Len's fires with different types and calibers of extinguishers supplied for the course, half of which turn out to be already discharged (because remember, Islands), with Len doggedly reigniting our target blaze. It's amazing to watch the new hazards he creates with every flippant toss of the torch: sometimes it lands with the flame pointing back squarely on its own canister, sometimes burning directly on a discarded cabinet or pallet or tire or other readily flammable object. More than once a fellow student has to cartoonishly dodge it as it rolls to a halt among us.

Len, obviously a connoisseur, quickly grows dissatisfied with the flame's quality and begins adding to the burning stew like a chef seasoning to taste. At one point, he asks us if anyone has a knife, which he uses to pry open paint cans and other household hazardous waste collection items, then to slash open lighter fluid containers directly over the flames, as if he's savagely gutting small animals that otherwise wouldn't bleed fast enough. The man's immersion in his work is so devotedly focused as to be almost meditative, in an insane caveman-at-a-big-tent-revival-type way, and I'll be honest: it's goddamn riveting.

(It also ends here, if the wind shifts.)

Then he becomes dissatisfied with the quantity of our blazing foe, crippled as it is by the confines of the car hood whose edges are now glowing dull red. He pours a trail of diesel directly onto the ground around the hood. This seems to help, but it's clearly Not Enough. He begins to throw other random objects - a computer printer, an old extinguisher hose - onto the blaze. Still not sated, he cracks open a few marine flares and waves them around very near us, his little increasingly-uneasy non-safety-goggled captive audience, before throwing them onto a cement block where they boil away blindingly behind him like minions.

(Well, I guess not everyone can pass the class.)

It is at this fevered point, with Len pacing and laughing and gesticulating wildly, unintelligible behind a WWII style gas mask, spilling highly-flammable substances on himself and now no longer able to restrain the compulsion to pull all the firing pins in the extinguishers himself, before relinquishing each one to a student, that Billy Boat-School and I lock eyes and silently, momentarily, share a wordless revelation: Len has completely fucking lost it. He's in an alternate state of being. He is overstimulated to the point of Nirvana, his fists clutching firing pins as if they were snakes, chanting at us to "get low!" as if this were his own personal shrieking mantra. He is, like footage of a Pentecostal possession by The Spirit, at once hilarious and terrifying.

(Not sure if speaking in tongues or just Marlboro-breath.)

We continue at this frenzy-pitch for around two hours - a stamina I quite frankly would not have expected from someone so clearly courting emphysema - after which time the sun has almost set, appearing very red and sick through the black shroud of probably one hundred carcinogens and teratogenic gases intermingling in a hazy soup over us. The official ending time of the scheduled STCW training day has long since come and gone. Under Len's spiritual guidance, we have each personally probably cheated a fiery death approximately a dozen times (though it's really anyone's guess what will now happen in our offspring's DNA). It has given a whole new meaning to the phrase "trial by fire."

And then, the most fantastic moment of all happens: we are completely out of charged extinguishers. With his beloved diesel-and-more Molotov cocktail flaming 15 feet into the sky, now restrained by neither the metal confines of the car hood nor the constraining cautions of common goddamn sense, Len discovers there are no more pins to be pulled: we are out of ammunition.

This seems to neither surprise nor worry Len in the least.

(I am become Len, Destroyer of Worlds.)

I hear Len's breath come out like an exaltation. Then he shoves his gas mask up onto his forehead, takes a sort of divine healing stagger-step backwards, and stands facing the fire in what appears to be moment of sacred reverie, possibly unaware of us, his small gaggle of onlookers still present, our smoke-watering eyes averted in all different awkward directions.

Billy Boat-School and I don't even have to look at each other to know we're on the same page at this point, but over the roar of the conflagration I can hear him losing it beside me.

"Guess we're done today," mutters Len, and just like that, we retreat to the waiting van with Len bringing up the rear, occasionally turning back for just one more look at his battlefield. You can just tell that the man's entire life force is wrapped up in this endlessly-repeated struggle: Len is born, dies, and is born again at the Saint Thomas dump, ad infinitum.

(Did not even know the human body could do that with a flare.)

As for Billy Boat-School and I? I guess you could say that was the day that forged our now decade-long friendship.