Captain Phil Harris (8 page)

“You know, you’re right,” said Phil calmly as he wiped the mess off. “A hardtop would be nice.”

Phil’s treatment of his cars was a testament to his impulsiveness. The black Corvette had been giving Phil trouble around the time he met Mary, so, unable to deal with the downtime required to repair it, he simply sold it.

Mary was quickly learning that patience was not one of Phil’s virtues.

Neither was a strong paternal instinct. At the time Mary and Phil hooked up, her son, Shane, was three and a half and her daughter, Meigon, was two. Mary was looking for stability, not riches. Phil knew nothing about children. He would roll through town in one of his Corvettes with him and Mary comfortably settled in the front bucket seats, while the kids were stuffed in the back. She wasn’t comfortable with that.

When they were out on one occasion, Phil offered to take Shane to the bathroom. When the two were done, out they came with Shane’s pants and underpants still around his ankles. It hadn’t occurred to Phil that a three-and-a-half-year-old might need some help with his clothes.

Mary was also surprised to find that Phil, so sharp and decisive when it came to commanding a crab boat, could be a scatterbrain when money was involved. He once took her out for a lavish dinner, the bill running up to three hundred dollars, but when the check came, he discovered he’d forgotten to bring any funds, so Mary wound up paying.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t have the money. Just the opposite. Phil was
dripping with the stuff thanks to his success in the Bering Sea. If he burned up a vast number of greenbacks, that was no problem. Dutch Harbor was always on Phil’s horizon.

In just their second week together, Phil took a meaningful step with Mary by bringing her over to meet his father, Grant, and his stepmother, Paula. Mary remembers Paula showing her the chickens in their backyard and their big red rooster, Henry, who, Mary said with a fond smile, chased her around the property, perhaps because she was wearing bright red. Phil also introduced Mary to his beloved grandmother, Eleanor.

As their courtship blossomed, he invited Mary to his 1,200-square-foot, three-bedroom home in Bothell with the intention of making it her new address.

First, however, he had to clear the decks. Phil had been living with a woman named Cheryl for the previous two years. No problem. He simply waited for Cheryl to go to work, packed up her stuff, and called her brother to pick it up, informing him that his sister no longer resided at Phil’s house.

In the middle of Mary’s first visit to Phil’s house, Cheryl barged in, tears flowing, and a dramatic confrontation played out. It turned out to be the girlfriend’s farewell scene. That day, Mary saw a different Phil, an insensitive Phil, and wondered how he could so easily turn off his feelings for his main squeeze of the previous few years. Mary tucked those concerns into the recesses of her mind, vowing to be prepared should she one day fall victim to a similar scenario. The Phil she was getting to know was utterly charming, but the Phil she had just witnessed was equally ruthless.

Against her better judgment, Mary stuck around. She soon learned it was a house like no other she had ever seen. People were constantly coming and going. Women called at all hours of the night. Cases of beer, Crown Royal whiskey, and expensive Stolichnaya vodka littered the place. There were constant food deliveries, nonstop drinking and pot smoking, people going in and out of the bathrooms in shifts.

Exhausted by the pace of the never-ending party, Mary was surprised Phil didn’t seem to feel the same way. “I wondered,” she said, “when he ever found the time to sleep.”

Phil could never even sit still. He would knock back a shot of Stolichnaya and chase it with a shot of Pepto-Bismol. He always had a cigarette dangling from his teeth or gripped between his fingers. At times, he’d have three or four going at once.

Mary had caught a glimpse of it on her first night with Phil, but she was soon confronted with undeniable evidence that Phil’s energy came from more than just cigarettes. She overheard him boasting that he’d spent $17,000 on cocaine in just three weeks. Alarmed, she voiced her concerns to Phil about his habit, but he waved her off. The way he saw it, he said, he was young and worked his butt off. He deserved to blow off steam during his time on land. Coke? Hell, it was the seventies, everyone was doing it, or at least all the hip, young partiers who could afford it. Besides, he said, it wasn’t like he was selling drugs. He was just a happy consumer.

Although it paled in comparison to his other addictions, Phil also became hooked on coffee after buying Mary an espresso machine. From then on, he gave up his habit of beginning the day with Coke, as in Coca-Cola, opting instead for a cup of java.

“Imagine Phil in his twenties,” Mary said. “He already had way too much energy. Now the caffeine was kicking in, too.”

After getting a taste of Phil’s lifestyle, Mary summed it up in three words: “It was insane.”

•   •   •

She was referring to more than just the fact that Phil was a party animal. He was also an owner of animals, both live and stuffed, his crazy menagerie adding to his bizarre home life.

Phil’s place looked like a taxidermist’s shop with mounted skins everywhere. The stuffed animals creeped Mary out, but not as much as the live ones. He had a huge collection of strange pets: snakes, lizards including iguanas, and piranhas, along with rats to feed the many
snakes. He took delight in serving up the rats while they were still tiny, knowing that once they reached full size, they became the only creatures on earth that made him cringe. He had no such problem with his two spiders: not your everyday, garden-variety spiders, but gargantuan tarantulas.

One time years later, when Phil and Mary were married and Josh and Jake were youngsters, Mary had the house fumigated while Phil was at sea. It was only after the structure had been covered up and the process begun that she realized she had forgotten about Harold, Phil’s favorite tarantula.

Uh-oh, she thought. Poor Harold; he’s probably dead.

It was an understandable mistake.

“It’s not like Harold jumped up and down every day,” Mary said, “and let you know he was there.”

Upon hearing that Harold had been left behind, Josh didn’t shed any tears.

“Fuck that thing,” he said. “I hated it.”

“That’s understandable,” said Mary. “Phil loved to freak his guests out, so he made Josh pick up Harold, the meaner of the two spiders, and frighten people.”

When the house was opened up after the fumigation, Mary looked in Harold’s cage and thought she was seeing his lifeless carcass. What she didn’t know was that tarantulas shed their skin and she was looking at the result of that process. With a sigh, she fought off a wave of disgust, took the cage, carcass and all, and tossed it in the garage.

But Harold himself was, unfortunately for all but Phil, alive and well. He was hiding under a piece of tree bark in his cage and remained hidden even as Mary moved the cage to the garage.

No one knew that for eight months. Then one day, when Mary’s kids wanted a home for a new lizard, she remembered the container she thought was Harold’s final resting place. She went out to the garage, found the cage, wrapped her hand around a tissue, and gingerly stuck her arm in to remove Harold’s supposed remains.

As she wrapped her fingers around the dark object at the bottom, her heart started beating furiously, followed by a loud scream.

The carcass was moving.

It was Harold, back from the dead. He was all shriveled up but still functioning. He had survived a fumigation and eight months of abandonment.

Even Mary felt sorry for him, so sorry that she got him a treat, a bunch of crickets, and filled up his old cup with water.

“He drank for two hours and the puffball got bigger and bigger,” Mary said. “He was fine.”

There was no telling what might pop up in Phil’s house. One night, Joe Wabey, Phil’s first captain, came over and plopped down on the couch.

“N-o-o-o, don’t sit there!” yelled Phil.

Suddenly, out from behind a cushion popped a snake.

Mary didn’t dislike all of Phil’s pets. She was fond of the rabbits, hamsters, and, in particular, his three parrots. Chico was Phil’s blue and gold macaw. Turkey was Phil’s green Amazon parrot. Boo-Boo was a green-winged macaw who earned his name by crapping at random in lieu of letting the newspapers beneath his perch catch his droppings.

The macaws could be intimidating in their own way. One of them once bit a broomstick in half.

“That thing was bad,” said Joe Duvey, one of Phil’s friends stretching back to his teen years.

Mary also liked Phil’s Doberman, Maxwell, at least on the day when she had to rescue Phil from his dog. He had gone outside to get in his car, but found his path blocked by Maxwell. The dog was growling furiously as if Phil were a burglar trying to escape.

Maxwell would listen to Mary because, while Phil was out to sea much of the time, it was Mary who fed the dog. So Phil was forced to call her to rescue him while several of his buddies stood around, hysterical at the sight of a helpless Phil needing his wife to save him from his own dog.

Mary loved it. It was the only time she felt that she, not Phil, was in control.

Lack of recognition wasn’t the only reason Maxwell would get in Phil’s face. When he drove around, Maxwell was his regular companion in the passenger seat. Phil loved to stop for burgers, but, if he didn’t bring out a cheeseburger for Maxwell, the Doberman wouldn’t let him back in the car.

“You’d come over to Phil’s house,” said Jeff Sheets, another longtime friend, “the door would be wide open, music blaring, and there would be Phil sleeping on the couch and Maxwell on the floor next to him, just silently staring at you. You didn’t dare get any closer until Phil woke up.”

It didn’t take Hugh Gerrard, Phil’s next-door neighbor, long to realize Phil was a character like no other. In 1978, on the day after Hugh moved in, he left his house to go to work only to discover an eighteen-wheeler blocking the driveway he shared with Phil.

When he knocked on Phil’s door, he was greeted by a sight he still remembers to this day. “Phil was standing there, wearing nothing but jeans and a big smile,” Hugh said, “his hair looking like he came from friggin’ Mars.”

“Hey, I’m your new neighbor,” said Hugh, twenty-four at the time, three years older than Phil. “I need to get to work, but I can’t get out of the driveway. Could you, or whoever owns that vehicle, move it?”

“Come on in,” said Phil with a big smile. “Wanna smoke a joint?”

It was seven thirty in the morning.

“No, I’ll pass on the joint,” said Hugh. “If you could just ask whoever owns that truck to please move it, I’d appreciate it.”

“Okay,” said Phil, “and come back after work.”

Curious after his brief meeting with his new neighbor, Hugh did return that night. Peeking in a window, he saw two Harley-Davidsons parked in the middle of the
kitchen,
parts strewn on the floor, oil leaking all over the place.

Wow, this guy’s great, Hugh thought. Who gets to park a Harley in his kitchen, much less two of them? He even had a motorcycle engine in the bathtub.

When Hugh came inside, Phil proudly showed off his stuffed wolverine and his piranhas, which he kept healthy with a steady flow of goldfish and mice, then pulled out Mona, a live boa constrictor eight to ten feet long. Phil kept it in a spare bedroom and would periodically toss in live rats—and the occasional rabbit as a special treat for Mona. It wasn’t such a treat for Mary, though. Some of the rats had eluded Mona, chewed their way through the plasterboard, and were living in the wall.

As Phil and Hugh became acquainted that first night, they heard a car pull up in the driveway.

“That’s my wife, Laurie,” said Hugh, looking out the window.

“Let’s go out so I can meet her,” said Phil. Rather than leaving Mona behind, Phil wrapped the boa around his neck.

Laurie, a businesswoman, was wearing a conservative suit. As she got out of the car, Phil, after looking her up and down, said, “What are you, a fucking librarian?”

He then proceeded to uncurl Mona and wrap the boa around Laurie’s neck. She reacted with a nervous laugh.

“What are ya gonna do?” said Hugh, recalling the scene. “That was just Phil.”

•   •   •

No matter how outrageous he got, Phil never seemed to chase people away.

“Phil Harris was one of the most charismatic people you’ll ever meet,” said Hugh. “He just had that aura that made you want to hang out with the guy. He was like a rock star even before he was a TV star.”

The charisma went only so far with Mary. Any thoughts she had of moving into Phil’s home ended on the night of her third visit to the
house, when Meigon woke up screaming after Phil drove his Harley in the front door, did a burnout on the dining-room floor, and then roared out the back door.

“I can’t have this shit around my daughter,” an enraged Mary told Phil. “This is crazy, not to mention the fact that I noticed you have a loaded gun hanging next to your bed. This is no place for my Meigon.

“I’m going home. But before I do, I would appreciate it if you would pay me back the three hundred dollars you borrowed from me for that dinner.”

With a look of chagrin, something Mary had never before seen on Phil’s face, he said, “I don’t have the money right now, but if you go out with me tomorrow, I’ll give it to you then.”

“That’s blackmail,” responded Mary. “Just pay me back and we’ll call it even.”

Though she didn’t get the money, Mary took her daughter and left. But, as she quickly learned, when Phil wanted something, he became obsessed. And he wanted Mary back.

It was like he was wooing her all over again, but at an even more desperate level. Again came the roses to her door, this time enough to fill several flower shops. Again came the calls, this time every twenty minutes. She stopped answering the phone.

So Phil decided to confront Mary in person. He would drive by her house day and night.

When she didn’t respond, he came to the club. She sent word she was too busy to see him, but he wouldn’t leave.