Captain Phil Harris (10 page)

Phil could be obsessive, but the same song for four hours in a row in the middle of the night, with the music echoing down the street? Mary knew something was wrong.

Going into the house, she found Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” on the stereo, the repeat button in the on position, and Phil passed out on the couch.

•   •   •

Phil always seemed to keep the neighbors happy, though, no matter how unruly he became. The keys to his success: his infectious charm and the twenty-five-pound boxes of crab he brought home whenever he returned from the sea.

It was not unusual for Phil, upon returning after fishing for months, to knock on Hugh and Laurie Gerrard’s bedroom window at 3:00 a.m., shouting, “Good morning!” while hoisting a box of crab legs for his friends. When Laurie would catch a glimpse through her window of Phil wearing his Jack Nicholson grin, she would say, with a groan, “Oh no, he’s back.”

Those around Phil were always kidding him about his sense of time and season. He didn’t have any. Day or night, early or late, hot weather or cold, Phil never seemed to notice the difference.

He might hop on his motorcycle in the middle of the night in a
T-shirt in the dead of winter and take off. After a few miles, it would suddenly occur to him that he was cold. So he’d head for the home of his nearest friend, Hugh or Jeff Sheets or Joe Duvey.

“I’m cold,” he’d say. “Can I borrow a sweatshirt?”

Phil’s return from a fishing trip also meant enough chemical enhancements to ensure a high-octane run of days, each filled with enough outrageous behavior to make Phil worthy of a reality show long before
Deadliest Catch
was ever conceived.

Along with the drinking and the drugs, Phil also loved to gamble, and when those elements were mixed, the result could be toxic. His stubborn streak exacerbated the bad chemistry.

He’d have Mary cringing as she watched him burn through mountains of chips during their casino outings. She witnessed Phil torch three hundred dollars every three seconds at many a blackjack table.

Mary recalled pit bosses at a Lake Tahoe resort once urging Phil to keep playing even though he was in an alcoholic stupor. Phil’s losses mounted until the night culminated with him falling onto the table and knocking everyone’s drinks over.

One of the strangest things about Phil’s gambling was that, at the same time, he was not a spendthrift. Phil’s friend Dan recalls that Phil would go to thrift shops to buy his jeans. He’d purchase a stack at a time, explaining that he wasn’t “gonna pay big money” for pants when he could get them so much cheaper. Then he’d head to a casino and blow five grand at a blackjack table.

Another time, Phil was gambling at Harrah’s in Tahoe, accompanied by Hugh. While Phil became deeply engrossed in playing blackjack, Hugh was busy getting hammered on the complimentary drinks that kept coming his way.

One of Phil’s favorite bartenders, Neil, was supplying the booze. Seeing Hugh spill drink after drink on the gaming table, Neil, as his shift ended, told Phil, “You should take your buddy home.”

Replied Phil, “Fuck that. If he goes, I go.”

They stayed. The next night when Neil returned for his shift, Phil and Hugh were still at the same table. Neil couldn’t believe it.

This time, it was Hugh’s turn to do a belly flop onto the green playing surface, sending drinks, cards, and chips in all directions.

A couple of flops later, the boys were eighty-sixed. But Phil wasn’t ready to head home. He had pancakes at IHOP on his mind. Phil loved his pancakes.

When they reached the restaurant by cab, Phil ordered the driver to pull up in front of a huge window, in full view of a group of churchgoers who had arrived for breakfast from Sunday morning services.

Phil saw that Hugh was getting greener and greener by the minute, so Phil left him there, half in and half out of the cab, staring vacantly at the good folks shielded from him by the glass.

What happened next was a scene straight out of
The Exorcist:
the window splattered, the customers disgusted, and Phil, seated at a nearby table, amused.

But not distracted for long from his mission. Without so much as a pause, Phil grabbed his fork and dug into the triple-decker stack of flapjacks in front of him.

Finally, reluctantly, Phil was forced to cut his meal short when Hugh tumbled onto the pavement. Phil came out, stuffed Hugh back into the cab, and off they went with the waiter in hopeless pursuit, waving the unpaid bill.

Hugh got his revenge later that day. Sobered up, he was driving Phil’s car with Phil asleep in the passenger seat, contentedly snoring after his marathon blackjack session, his bare feet sticking out the window.

When a diesel truck pulled alongside, Hugh, a mischievous look in his eye, gave the trucker the universal closed-fist pumping sign to blow his horn.

The trucker responded with a resounding blast, causing Phil, not
eight feet from the horn, to bolt upright, his head nearly crashing through the front window.

Hugh gave the driver a grateful salute, his day complete.

•   •   •

One day, Hugh heard a persistent knock at his front door. It was Phil looking more terrible than usual, awash in blood and in obvious pain, with all sorts of twigs and thorns clinging to his body, the result of careening off the road.

“Man,” he said, “I wrecked my bike and walked all the way here.”

When Phil pulled his shirt up, Hugh could see his friend had broken his collarbone, the injury so severe that the bone was jutting out grotesquely through the flesh.

“Man, it was gnarly,” recalled Hugh years later.

Phil had somehow managed to walk two miles to get to Hugh’s house.

“Why didn’t you go straight to the hospital?” Hugh asked him.

“Well, they’d know I was drunk and fucked-up,” said Phil.

“The hospital doesn’t care,” Hugh told him.

Hugh gently put Phil in his car and then raced at speeds up to one hundred miles an hour in order to get his buddy to people who could relieve the pain.

When Phil returned home, his shoulder was still bothering him, the joint popping in and out of alignment, but he refused to see a doctor.

“If you don’t do something about it,” Mary insisted, “you will have problems when you get older.”

“I’m not going to live that long anyway,” Phil replied.

He proceeded to gobble down a handful of pain pills, jumped on another bike, and roared away, heading for a nearby bar.

Just another day in Phil’s self-destructive life.

When Phil pushed the envelope with Mary, which he did quite often, he would frequently make up for it by whisking her away on a vacation at some exotic location.

“Phil knew how to vacation,” said Mary. They once spent ten days
in Maui, staying in luxurious digs and living it up. But vacations with Phil could quickly change from bliss to torture.

Having grown up in Hawaii, Mary got excited when Phil agreed to let her show him where she’d spent her teen years and gone to high school. “But, as it turned out,” Mary said, “he just wanted to sit in the hotel room, watch football, drink alcohol, and snort coke. I was so disappointed. He seemed to have forgotten how to enjoy life without drugs or alcohol.

“There was no in between with him. He was either running around with his hair on fire or he was a total couch potato.”

Phil would go fishing for months at a time and return with a pile of money. After he had risked his life, grinding out the grueling hours demanded by the Bering Sea, who could deny him his pleasures? As he reiterated to Mary over and over again, he wasn’t hurting anybody—other than maybe himself, he sometimes conceded. So he lived by his unwavering creed: You’re only young once. Let’s party. And she partied right along with him.

Mary had her own issues with alcohol: she couldn’t hold her liquor. “Mary doesn’t have a drinking problem,” Phil once said. “She’s a problem when she drinks.”

One spring, Phil invited her to join him in Alaska for a fishing trip. He had convinced her that she wouldn’t have to worry about the weather. It was May, not January, and the storms had long since passed.

He got Mary an airline ticket for Anchorage, but there are no guarantees when it comes to Alaskan weather and, on the day of her scheduled departure, fog had rolled into Anchorage, delaying the flight.

Stuck in Seattle’s Sea-Tac Airport, Mary went into the bar for a drink. She kept drinking as the delay stretched to sixteen hours. That’s a lot of drinks.

“I had to redo my makeup so many times,” Mary said, “I thought I was going to have to peel it off with a spatula.”

Mary finally got on the plane, but, even after it took off, she was
unable to relax. Not only was the flight extremely bumpy, but, as the plane neared Anchorage, she could see that the fog hadn’t dissipated.

So, to calm her nerves, she kept drinking.

“By the time we got there,” she said, “I was drunker than a skunk.”

Gingerly getting off the plane and lurching through the airport, Mary could see, through squinting eyes, the word “Bar” on a sign.

Anxious to get off her feet, she stumbled in, only to find the place was packed with fishermen, every chair taken.

Didn’t matter. She could have her choice of seats. From all sides of the room, bar patrons were motioning to her.

“You can sit here right next to me,” said one.

“No, sit here,” said another.

Or here.

Or there.

These guys are so friendly, she thought, so nice.

Mary plopped down and, empowered by the liquor, began telling jokes, one after another.

You would have thought she was Jay Leno or David Letterman delivering the monologue because all the fishermen at the surrounding tables were paying rapt attention to her.

It was then that she heard someone whispering, “Mary, Mary, get over here.”

It was a familiar voice coming from a nearby booth.

She soon realized it was Phil trying to alert her. About what?

In her drunken stupor, Mary wasn’t aware she had stumbled into the bar with one of her breasts hanging out.

“That’s why I was so popular,” she said.

•   •   •

Phil and Mary celebrated one New Year’s Eve at a restaurant named Jonah and the Whale in Bellevue, Washington. The booze and drugs flowed freely.

Afterward, they went to a hotel, the Washington Plaza, but became separated after Mary passed out in the hallway.

A hotel employee found her, got her to her room, opened it, and let her lurch in.

Only it wasn’t her room. She fell into a bed already occupied by two other hotel guests.

“Who are you?” demanded the woman, her eyes opening to find Mary in her face.

“Who are you?” Mary replied just as adamantly.

Then, the other head popped up, that of the woman’s male companion. “Uh oh,” said Mary. “I guess I’m the one who doesn’t belong.”

Meanwhile, livid at her for disappearing, Phil stomped home. Mary made it back to the house by cab, but by then, Phil had already given up on her. She found him in their bed with another woman.

Now it was Mary’s turn to be livid. She took off and stayed away for a month, living with friends in Yakima, Washington.

When she finally returned, Mary had a warning for Phil. “Every time you cheat on me,” she said, “I’ll cheat on you twice.”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Phil told her.

“No,” Mary agreed, “but it sure evens the score.”

“We hurt each other so much with all that payback stuff,” Mary later said. “I would have thought me cheating to get even would have made him stop, or at least kick me out.”

Instead, she’d find Phil at restaurants or clubs with women hanging on him or taking advantage of his seemingly never-ending supply of coke.

When Mary would catch him, she would spew her bitterness at his female companion of the moment, then ask Phil in disgust if he was coming home. “He’d stumble back to our house,” Mary said, “then pass out on the front porch, where I’d leave him all night.”

By the early 1980s, Phil had become convinced that Mary was cheating on him while he was at sea, a belief bolstered by rumors that drifted back to him from home. Jeff got a call from Phil one time at four thirty in the morning. “I want you to come over here right now,” Phil said.

“You’re back from fishing a little early, aren’t you?” he asked Phil when he got to the house.

“Yeah, well, I found out Brad [Mary’s ex-husband] was trying to fuck Mary while I was gone even though there was no chance that was going to happen,” said Phil. “I wanted you to hear this phone call I’m about to make.”

Phil dialed a number, and Jeff heard him describe Brad and tell the person on the line, “I’ll give you five hundred bucks if you take this guy’s legs out.”

Jeff had no doubt Phil was dead serious.

Phil then called Brad and told him, “Hey, I just put out a contract on you, so watch your back.”

Brad took off and spent five days at a friend’s pig farm, sleeping in a back room while clutching a .22-caliber rifle.

Finally, Phil called back and said, “Okay, don’t worry about it. I’m not going to do anything.”

He never did, although he wouldn’t talk to Brad after that and never forgave him. And though everyone who knew him agrees that Phil would never have followed through on such a threat, it wasn’t the first time Phil used the power of a gun to send a message.

Once, when someone ratted out one of his dealers, Phil learned who the snitch was, then lured him over to the house under the pretext of asking for a drug delivery. When the snitch arrived, Phil stuck his .44 Magnum in the man’s mouth and told him, “If you ever fuck me or any of my friends again, I’ll kill ya.”

His temper and his .44 Magnum raised the ire of the local police on more than one occasion.

One blazing hot summer day, Phil, Mary, and Hugh Gerrard were relaxing with a few cold beers when a car streaked by at a hellacious clip, almost hitting Meigon. Phil’s street was a dead end, so the reckless driver had to turn around.

Phil decided to greet the offender and point out the error of his driving habits. He planted himself in the middle of the street, sans
shirt, like a boxer preparing for battle. But this fighter was armed with more than his fists. He raised his .44 Magnum as the car raced toward him.