Captain Phil Harris (11 page)

It was the ultimate game of chicken, and the other guy blinked first. He pulled over and got chewed out by Phil, but when the lecture was over, the driver took off and called the cops. A few minutes later, they came roaring up to Phil’s house, guns drawn.

Phil’s friend Dan Mittman remembers the gun being “as big as a hog’s leg.” After the police saw the weapon, it was Phil who was on the receiving end of a lecture. But, as was often the case with him, he soon won over those who questioned him.

When they asked Phil why he had a gun that size, he smiled and said, “It’s the biggest I could find. If I could’ve found a bigger one, I would have bought it by now.”

•   •   •

In 1982, having worn Phil’s engagement ring for four turbulent years, Mary decided it was time for him to, in terms he could understand, fish or cut bait. “What am I wearing this ring for?” she demanded. “If we don’t stop all this payback stuff and get married the next time you come home from Alaska, I think we should just go our separate ways. You said you wanted to start a family. I’m twenty-eight and I’m ready. I want to do things right. I’m willing to start fresh with a clean slate. But no more cheating and no more craziness.”

“That sounds like an ultimatum,” Phil said. “I don’t like ultimatums.”

“That’s the deal,” she replied. “It’s your choice, marriage or cutting our losses before we end up hating each other.”

With the issue unresolved, they jetted off for a Las Vegas vacation. Naturally, with his love of all forms of wildlife, Phil took Mary to the Siegfried & Roy show. Mary could tell Phil was really enjoying it.

Then, all of a sudden, right in the middle of the performance, he stood up and declared, “This is the best show ever. Let’s leave right now and get married.”

“Don’t you at least want to see the rest of the show?” Mary asked.

“Nope,” replied Phil.

And off they went.

They hailed a cab and stopped to get a little liquid confidence to steady their nerves.

By the time they made it to the altar in one of the many dingy, bare-essentials wedding chapels spread around the city, Phil and Mary were both zombies. And so, in April of 1982, they slurred their “I do’s” and were pronounced husband and wife.

The next morning, as Phil walked by their bathroom in the hotel, he saw Mary on the floor, hugging the toilet bowl. Noticing something stuck on her back, Phil peeled it off.

It was their wedding certificate.

What woman in her right mind would want to be with a guy who is never there?

—Josh

When Mary got pregnant, Phil got scared.

Bearing the responsibility for keeping crew members alive under the most frightening nautical conditions on earth was manageable. Bearing the responsibility for raising a child seemed, in some ways, unimaginable to Phil. As Mary once said, “Not much scares Phil. Just fatherhood and rats.”

When Mary was wheeled into the delivery room, Phil accompanied her, but he didn’t stay long. Doctors don’t want nervous wrecks hanging over them while they work. Phil was ordered to go out into the hall, where he stood, anxiously clutching his wife’s purse, while his first son entered the world.

Eleven months after the wedding, Joshua Grant Harris was born on March 18, 1983.

Although he was premature by three weeks, the baby proved to be healthy and strong. That can be crucial to your well-being when your father has a drinking problem. Although he had hoped for a girl, Phil was thrilled with his new son, but not thrilled enough to give up alcohol.

When Josh was three months old, a drunk Phil picked him up, but accidentally dropped the baby on his head. Fortunately, Josh was okay, but that didn’t stop a furious Mary from verbally lambasting Phil.

He responded by pinning her up against a wall before suddenly backing off and dropping his head in shame.

“I’m fucking up,” he admitted. “I just feel so much pressure. Sometimes, I just wish I was a bum with nothing to lose.”

Mary, worried about her young son’s safety, was not satisfied with her husband’s response. Neither was a neighbor, who called the police. When they arrived, Phil offered to leave, but Mary saved him the trouble. She packed Josh up, along with Meigon (Shane was with his father at the time), and took off.

She stayed with a friend for three weeks. Phil would drive by her temporary home obviously drunk, shout profanities, and harass Mary.

But no matter how much Phil would bombard Mary with verbal abuse, she couldn’t stay away. She loved him, and every time he promised to change and vowed to give up his addictions, she felt that this was the time he meant it. This was the time he would truly reform.

So back she came with Josh after twenty-one days and things returned to normal. But for Phil, normal meant drunk.

For Josh, that almost meant disaster once again when he was eight months old. As he was crawling around the house, he spotted a shot glass full of vodka left on a coffee table. With no one else paying attention, he furiously moved his little arms and legs to propel himself over there and then pulled his small body up.

As Mary’s eyes locked on Josh, she saw the last drops of vodka disappearing down his throat. She yelled at Phil that they needed to rush their son to the hospital.

“Wait a minute,” said Phil, his palms pumping downward to signal for calmness, his gaze focused on his infant child. Josh’s eyes got big, his breathing heavy.

But the crisis quickly passed, and a look of serenity came over his
face. He dropped back to the floor and resumed crawling, heading off in search of more mischief.

“He’s fine,” said Phil, a big grin on his face. “He’s just like me.”

That wasn’t necessarily a good thing. One afternoon late in 1983, the owner of a boat on which Phil was serving as captain showed up unannounced at the dock and found Phil passed out in the wheelhouse from too much booze.

Not only was Phil fired, but, his reputation soiled, he was run aground indefinitely, with no one in the fishing industry willing to hire him.

“We lost everything,” Mary said. “Our house, the land, the Corvettes, the Porsche, the Harley, and the parrots. It was terrible.”

All that Phil had worked so hard for was gone in the time it took to guzzle a bottle of vodka. As hard as all that was, taking him away from the sea might have been the most painful punishment of all.

Phil and Mary rented a house, he got a job doing construction for a friend, and she provided in-home day care. After all that time he had spent as the boss, with men older than he was taking his orders and placing their lives in his hands, he was now just another guy punching a time clock. It was a humbling time for Phil.

It was about a year before his exile on dry land came to an end. Phil’s reliability and excellence as a captain finally overshadowed his personal failings, earning him another boat,
The Dominator
, a trawler operating out of Kodiak Island off the coast of Alaska.

But just a few months later, in early 1985, his main focus turned back to Bothell after Mary again became pregnant. Again, Phil hoped for a girl. He was so certain that he was going to have a daughter this time that he bought a pink outfit for the baby to wear home from the hospital.

Mary felt that Phil’s yearning for a girl stemmed from the fact that he had fathered a daughter back in high school. Before the baby was even born, Phil had told the mother he would have nothing to do with the child. He felt he was too young for the obligations that came with
parenting. As Mary found out years later, Phil had a tough time shaking those feelings.

Mary went into labor on a stormy night in Bothell. As Phil drove her to the hospital through heavy rain, crackling lightning, and powerful winds, he popped Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” into his CD player and turned the volume up full blast.

The first cries Phil heard while waiting outside the delivery room were soft and quiet, reinforcing his belief that the baby was a girl.

Instead, Phil was met by his and Mary’s second son, Jacob Charles Harris, born October 21, 1985.

“Well, I guess I’d better take this outfit back to the store,” Phil said. “We can’t take our son home dressed in pink.”

Any disappointment Phil felt melted away when he picked Jake up and held him in his arms. He couldn’t help noticing that he had another cute, lovable son.

•   •   •

The money in Kodiak was good, but Phil wasn’t happy with either his crew or his boat. He felt that the crew didn’t give him the respect he was due and that his boat was a downgrade.
The Dominator
was referred to as a dragger because it caught fish by dragging a net through the water behind it. To Phil, that was a boring operation compared to the challenge of trying to catch crabs by submerging eight-hundred-pound pots in the stormy waters of the Bering Sea.

“This is not me,” he told Mary. “I’m a crab fisherman.”

Would Phil ever get back to that life? Despite his earlier missteps, Phil was still known from Seattle to Dutch Harbor and beyond as a hard-driving captain who was calm in crises and knowledgeable about the sea and the art of plucking boatloads of crab from its depths. And most important of all, he had a reputation for always keeping the safety of his crew his top priority.

All those attributes soon resulted in offers from owners in the crab boat fleet. Phil became a crab boat captain again, working on several
ships before winding up as skipper of the
Shishaldin,
named for the tallest volcano in the Aleutian Islands.

Back on the Bering Sea, Phil was soon living the good life again. And on shore, that meant the high life. He seemed determined to make up for lost party time.

“You know, you’re not too tough to die,” Mary told him. “Your body is a machine, and look what you’re putting into it—junk food, booze, and drugs.”

Phil had more than just his own health to worry about. His addictions were also affecting those around him. But Phil didn’t realize the consequences until it was too late—until after he found himself to blame for a tragedy that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Back in the summer of 1980, Phil, Mary, Hugh, and Laurie had wanted to go out one balmy evening but lacked a babysitter for Meigon. Steve Skuttle, Phil’s best friend from high school, volunteered to watch her.

In appreciation, Phil handed Steve a bottle of Stoli vodka. Phil had acquired a taste for Stoli after being exposed to it out on the Bering Sea, courtesy of Russian sailors. Phil would trade several pairs of jeans, prized by the Russians, in exchange for a couple of cases of Stoli.

Steve had developed the taste as well, and once Phil and Mary left and Meigon had been put to bed, he proceeded to consume the entire bottle. Upon the return of the two couples, Steve bid them adieu, hopped in his car, and headed for home.

Perhaps he was able to conceal his inebriated state, or perhaps, with Phil and Mary focused on looking in on the sleeping Meigon, nobody noticed. But it would have been hard for anyone in Steve’s vicinity on the road not to notice just how drunk he was. He wound up wrapping his car around a tree.

“He basically killed himself,” said Hugh.

Not at first. At the hospital, Steve, though badly hurt, was revived. When Phil was notified of the crash, he ran over to the hospital on
foot. When he arrived, Phil learned that Steve had suffered massive injuries, the most severe to his liver.

Hugh soon joined Phil in the intensive care unit, where Phil stood helplessly, devastated by the condition of his old high school buddy. When Phil and Hugh left the room, Hugh witnessed something few human beings had ever seen: Phil Harris crying. His tough-guy persona melted away as his anguish took hold.

Along with the grief, Phil was crushed by guilt. He felt responsible for the wreck because he had provided Steve with the liquor that had led to the tragedy.

When it was time for Phil to head back up to Alaska, he asked Hugh to commit to taking care of Steve in his absence. Anything to ease your mind, Hugh replied.

Steve spent months in intensive care, with Hugh a constant visitor. He continued to keep an eye on Steve after he was released, but there wasn’t much progress to report. With his liver permanently damaged, Steve was never the same.

Nor was Phil, to some degree. He told Steve more than once that he felt he was to blame for the accident. And every time, Steve assured him that it wasn’t the case. But for the next five years, until the day in 1985 when Steve died at age twenty-nine, Phil never stopped apologizing.

“That was the second time I saw Phil cry,” said Hugh. “Steve’s death really had an impact on him. I think it was the first time a close friend of his had died.

“The ordeal with Steve showed me that Phil was much more than this rough, tough crab fisherman, the character people knew from Alaska. He really had a heart.”

The only other time people saw Phil cry was after the death of his grandmother, Grant’s mother, Eleanor Van Noy.

“That was another part of Phil’s life that most people didn’t know about,” Hugh said. “Whenever he would come back from Alaska, he would diligently go over to visit his grandmother. He would get her
up and make sure she could still move around. He’d crack jokes and make her laugh.”

Phil was also there for his fun-loving neighbor and friend, Hugh Gerrard, when Hugh was making a genuine effort to escape the clutches of his addiction. Cocaine had long been Hugh’s mistress and alcohol her lady-in-waiting, but in July of 1986, he went into rehab.

“Most of my friends fell off the face of the earth when I became clean and sober,” he said, “but Phil stayed true to me. Party or no party, Phil was a loyal friend.”

While supportive, Phil couldn’t totally stifle his tendency to goad and agitate. He was constantly trying to coax Hugh into taking a shot of booze. But Hugh knew that, if he fell for it, Phil would chew him out for being a weakling and falling off the wagon.

“I was fucked either way,” Hugh said, “but I was more fucked if I took that drink.”

So he didn’t.