The last time I saw Mark Wain, I threatened to whack him in the head with a shovel.
At the time, early autumn, 2004, he was trying to set fire to a pile of laundry in my backyard. Drunk, in despair over the Coast Guard revoking his seaman?s papers after a lifetime of working on merchant ships, Wain welcomed the relief the shovel might bring.
“Do it,” he said, close to tears. “Please.”
I couldn?t and he disappeared into the Baltimore night after living in my Greektown basement for about a year.
Wain and I sailed together in the deck department of a British cable ship over the summer of 2002. He was a real seaman, having been around the world and around the Horn many times, and I was a Popeye pretender with a notebook instead of a marlin spike.
We discussed books and the sea, women and shenanigans and became friends. I read Fitzgerald?s “Tender Is The Night” in the paint locker while he used pliers to sculpt ash trays out of coffee cans. When we moored at Fort McHenry to sign off the Atlantic Guardian, I went to work on “The Wire” and let Wain bunk at my house between ships.
I had one rule for his residency ? no booze ? and for several months he honored that prohibition. And then he didn?t and there was a lot of headaches, mostly mine, and trips to the Veterans Administration hospital on North Greene Street.
One night, I came home and found him bombed and trying to set his clothes on fire in the backyard. He?d just learned that the Coast Guard wasn?t going to let him sail anymore, a career since he was a teenager. Haven?t heard from him since.
Last week, I got an e-mail from Wain?s brother, whom I?ve not met but heard a lot about from Mark when he told family stories ? his father was a cop ? on the stern.
“My name is Gary Wain and I have been searching for my brother since our mother passed away two years ago” in East Liverpool, Ohio, he wrote. “Have you heard or seen Mark since he left Baltimore?”
I was sorry to tell him no, I had not. But I?ve called the attorney who tried to keep the Coast Guard from revoking Wain?s seaman?s papers; I?ve touched base with the Seafarer?s International Union, which tracks its members as best it can; and I?ve seen Mark Wain in the passing face of many a bearded homeless man on the beaches of Los Angeles, where he often waited out a bender.
The Coast Guard pulled Wain?s “Z Card” ? the federally issued Merchant Marine Document necessary to work on ships ? under a post-9/11 project called Operation Drydock.
The program was launched in late 2002, ostensibly to keep that nation?s merchant fleet safe from crime, particularly terrorism. Working with the FBI, they ran the names of more than 220,000 licensed mariners against criminal databases.
When Wain tried to renew his Z Card after being discharged from the Atlantic Guardian, his name popped up.
Nobody?s angel, with a drunk-and-disorderly record long enough to fill a modest chapter in “Moby Dick,” Wain was one of those old salts who functioned well at sea and less so on shore.
“A fine shipmate,” remembered Chris Kalinowski, his last bosun.
“We appealed to a Coast Guard administrative law judge,” said Annapolis attorney Nicholas A. Sloan, who argued that Wain?s behavior and attendant offenses were no threat to national security but was denied the rules of discovery by the prosecution.
Maryland Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, who chairs the House subcommittee that oversees the Coast Guard, is leading an effort to transfer those administrative law responsibilities to the National Transportation Safety Board. And the federal Government Accountability Office is investigating Coast Guard conduct during such hearings like Wain?s.
“When we were defending his seaman?s papers, the judge would leave the room, and the Coast Guard officials present would high-five each other in the courtroom,” said Sloan.
Cummings? office said this week that both investigations are continuing, but I fear the outcome is too late for my friend.
“I failed at everything until I went to sea,” Wain told me in a 2002 interview I hoped would become part of a book and not an attempt to see if he was dead or alive.
“I didn?t even have to think of sailing as a vocation, I was just good at it.”
Rafael Alvarez is an author and screenwriter based in Baltimore and Los Angeles. His books ? fiction, journalism and essays ? include “The Fountain of Highlandtown” and “Storyteller.” He can be reached at [email protected].
