The stories were recorded at an Indonesian restaurant in Christchurch on 8 October 2002, just after the EO returned from wintering-over at McMurdo.
Can you tell me the story about the first time you went to Pole?
I was there for about ten days. At the time I was a DA [Dining Attendant] in McMurdo. I was sent to Pole to work for this girl while she took R&R in McMurdo. When I got there they shuffled us into the Dome, and my boss at Pole, one of the chefs in the kitchen, walked up and handed me a water bottle and a coffee can.
She said, “You’re going to need to drink a lot of water.” I asked, “What’s this coffee can?” She said, “This is what you piss in. You’re not going to have a bathroom–well, you are, but you’re not going to want to leave the building every time.” They let me have my first day off to be acclimatized.
My first night there a Norwegian ski team came in. One guy had no arms. 
He had one arm with a pincher hook, and the other was a little stub. Their expedition was called The Unarmed Mission to the Pole. Liv Arnesen [the first woman to ski to the Pole] and those guys all showed up around the same time. I saw Liv Arnesen skiing in to the Pole while I was walking in to find out my work schedule. That night the Norwegians invited me to celebrate with them. We got all the champagne in town and we boozed hard. At the time I didn’t know the damage to be done.
I eventually left the Dome and went back to my room to crash. I was staying in a Jamesway at Summer Camp. The Jamesways were a little bit nicer than the ones I was used to. I had a bed, a carpet, a wardrobe, and the curtain.
In the middle of the night I woke up to piss, filling almost the entire coffee can with dark urine foaming at the top, some nice Michelob brew. At six my alarm went off, and I had possibly the worst hangover I’ve ever had in my life. At Pole the hangovers are brutal because of the altitude and the cold and the dryness. When I got out of bed I knocked my piss can over. It was a giant Folger’s can. Kwhoosh! It flowed under the curtain and across the hall. Oh God, I thought. Then the guy across the way yelled, “That better not be what I think it is!” It smelled like a burnt Cheerio, it was so strong. I grabbed my towel and ran into his room. I was in the nomad room. He had been there all season. I just dropped in and pissed on his carpet. He was yelling, “You got to put that underneath your bed!” I was saying, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I was in my boxers at the foot of his bed pamping it up with my towel. He was freaking out. I went for some cleaning supplies and tried to spray it, and it was just making it worse. It was foaming up and sploshing everywhere and it reeked. People were walking by and looking at me with disgust and anger.
I cleaned it as best I could. Now I had no towel, so I took three of my t-shirts and went over to the bathroom. At Pole they’re serious about the three minute shower. It must have been three minutes on the dot because some guy was yelling, “Hey! Get out of the shower! Now!”
My hair is long. I still had shampoo in it. I wasn’t even to the conditioner stage. “Turn the shower off now!” he yelled. I finally got the shampoo out. I wasn’t going to condition it today. I dried myself off with the t-shirt. The guy with the urine on his floor was there, and he was still bitter about it.
I finally cruised to work, where the Norwegian guys and Liv Arnesen had to work in the kitchen. They were staying outside in a tent, but in order to eat the food and use some of the facilities, [the National Science Foundation] was making them work. They had frostbite all over. They were mummified looking. They just came across the continent. My boss said, “Get ‘em going with some of the dishes over there, and then you can help out with some of this prep work.” I asked, “What are we supposed to do with what’s-his-name? He doesn’t have any arms.” She said, “Just give him some kind of chore. He’s pretty handy. He just skiied to Pole.” One of his arms was just a stump, with really bad frostbite on the end. The other arm was completely gone. He had to get some medical attention, which was another reason they had to work.
So one guy would wash a dish, then he’d hand it to the guy with the hook. He would grab the plate with his hook and hand it to the next guy who would dry it off. He was a wreck. They were all a wreck.
They cooked us a Norwegian fish dinner one night.
One guy at Pole was trying to take me under his wing. He thought I was a scientist helping out with the dishes. This was back when I wore John Lennon specs. He told me not to take offense because the Polees were just in their little zones already, and they saw me as an outsider. A bunch of them told me I could have free beer. They took me into this building and there were stacks and stacks and stacks of MGD. They told me, “You can have that beer for free! Take as much as you want!” I couldn’t figure out why no one else was drinking it. I had never heard of old beer that was no good. I’d never seen that before.
So I was drinking MGD in the lounge above the galley one night. A girl was playing the guitar, and some guy was harrassing everyone. I was smoking and he turned to me and said, “I’ll put my fucking boot in your head.”
I was just smoking. “I’ll put my motherfuckin’ boot in your head,” he said. I left after he cornered me in the back. He was grabbing me and stuff. That night he got in a fight. The next day they fired him and he flew out.
Did you see any other violence at Pole?
No, but here’s a story. Every year they send a Brownie or a Girl Scout down to the Pole. They get the ultimate VIP treatment. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Yeah. “Visit the scientists, little buddy.”
Right. I wasn’t in charge of this mission, but this guy stole a Spryte to go out to the old crashed airplane away from Pole. He had no authorization. He just jumped in a Spryte and went.
Who was the guy?
I think he was a mechanic. The guy was mad. He had a big fluffy hat. The Brownie drove while we surfed on the roof. He just pointed her in the right direction. It was like the Three Stooges. We got to the airplane and climbed down in it. When we came back the mechanic drove down the runway. The radio was not on. Suddenly we saw someone signal from afar, waving. There was an airplane coming down behind us. The guy pulled off real quick and said, “Run!” The plane landed right where the Spryte had been. We bailed and left a running Spryte there. I ran back to my room and hid. Later we had a little talk with the Brownie, “Just don’t talk about going out to that airplane.” The next day at the [All-Hands Meeting] they were trying to find out who was driving the Spryte.
What year was this?
94-95. I did fourteen months as a DA.. [laughter]
Was that your first year?
Yeah. That was the year they turned the greenhouse at Pole into a weed emporium. This was also when the Live from Antarctica show was going on. It was the first live video from Pole. They sent a schoolteacher down who was supposed to be Miss Goody-Twoshoes, representing the Live from Antarctica program. She was riding so much cock down there. She would just get done blowing some guy and then jump up, “Hi, students.” She was doing the pilots. I think she was screwing around one night with the guy who wanted to put a boot in my head. The Brownie hung out with her.
The show was PBS?
It was PBS. They were going to try to do Live from the Amazon, Live from All Over, but funding for it crashed.
So you’re in the first live feed from Pole?
Uh-huh. I’m in there when they’re doing the Pole shot and the schoolteacher is talking. You know how they have two Poles down there–the one that looks good and the one that’s moving?
Yeah, the real one.
The TV crew had us stand by the real one while they chiseled the Pole marker into its new spot. Which I’m sure confused everyone back home. It was fun though. My parents got to watch that.
Is this your last season?
It will be. I’m going down there, but I don’t care any more.
How many times have you said that before?
Twice.
But now you really think you’re done?
I don’t know if I’m ever going to go back down, but I’m saying I’m not. The ice has changed so much. It’s weird. If I look at it from when I first went down to where it is now, it’s completely different.
How has it changed?
Back then, there were Jamesways in McMurdo. The galley was ghetto, and had the O-side and the E-side. The Christmas decorations were up all season. The trucks were all beat up. No one was worried about anything. Now, the galley looks like a cheap ski lodge. Everyone complains. The dorms are getting better and better. Now there’s radiant floor heating. The bathroom floor is heated! [laughter] All the 203′s have radiant floor heating! [In compliance with some arcane governmental building code concerning adjoining passageways, what were once dorms 203, 204, and 205 are now called 203A, 203B, and 203C. Now there are three dorm 203's.] The store used to be hilarious. You could go in there and get a bottle of Jack for five bucks. They only had lame Navy Antarctic shirts. There were no souvenirs. There was nothing. Maybe that stupid postcard with the Elvis painting was still there, but that was about all they had.
Right. In 1958 McMurdo had three kinds of beer: Budweiser, Pabst, and Schlitz. Now there’s twenty kinds of Pinot Noir. The library used to have a military history collection. Now it’s all pop psychology and self-help books and Stephen King novels.
It’s just changed. When I first signed up to go down there I expected nothing short of living in a tent and maybe killing a seal. I didn’t know. Then when I got down there, a barefoot dude was playing a fiddle in my Jamesway. My room had a little bed and a coathanger holding a broken piece of glass as a mirror. I had my clothes hanging on coat hangers from the roof. There was a little hole in my wall where snow blew in when the choppers divebombed the Jamesway. All the guys in that friggin’ Jamesway wanted to kill the helo pilots. They’d fly overhead and it would shake the whole building. Later that night in the bar the pilots would be bragging about how close they got to the Jamesway. So snow would blow through the hole in my wall. My refrigerator was the floor beneath the bed. I just slid stuff underneath there.
Once a lady came up there. She was walking around the Jamesway saying, “Oh my God! They have people living like this? Living like barbarians? Like cavemen?” She went on and on. There was crap everywhere. Literally, it smelled bad, it looked bad. She flung open my curtain and said, “This is disgusting! This is sickening!” And I was just lying in bed looking at her. It must have looked like a homeless shelter up there. The floor was torn up. There were hairballs all over. No one cleaned.
You’d hear guys whacking off up there. Then you’d hear them groan. Then you’d hear quiet or you’d hear a sock coming off his foot. It was amazing how well your hearing would work up there. Or the noisy furnace would run and that’s when he’d be whacking off. You’d hear his bed squeaking until the furnace stopped and then you’d hear:
chk
chk
chk
chk
chk.
Then after a few seconds he’d realize that he didn’t care, so you’d hear, chk chk chk chk chk. Then you’d hear a come-soaked sock flopping down on the floor. Lively.
But the scariest thing was when these guys would come in really late at night, when the main lights were shut off. If you didn’t have a little pocket flashlight like I had, you couldn’t see, and if you were wasted, like these guys always were, you’d hear KABLAMM! The guy would go down the hall reaching for the walls, but the curtains would give and he’d fall into people’s rooms. All of a sudden you’d have a three hundred pound plumber falling into bed with you at four in the morning.
At night it was a struggle to walk up the hill. There used to be a mattress halfway up the hill and you’d see guys off to the side lying down to take a rest in the cold. The wind whipped down that hill. A guy would have his coat over his face and you’d pat him on the shoulder and pick him up.
It seemed there was always someone passed out in the bathroom. The bathroom was always warm for some odd reason. Or people would crash out in the laundry room on top of the dryer.
In order to get to my room I had to go through the lounge where there’d be all the guys with no shirts and barefoot, with the fiddle and the whisky bottle. It was so raw. I thought, “Look what happens when you let men go amuck.”
I was one of the last to leave the Jamesway before it was torn down. Dorms 210 and 211 had just opened and everyone was moving down there. Everyone was gung-ho to get out of the Jamesway, but I liked it, and so did Skuaman. He took over half a Jamesway because everyone had moved out. He devised a net system to catch skuas. [Skuas are large Antarctic gulls.] He’d throw some food down and when a skua would come in he’d pull a string and a net would fall. The bird would try to bite him so he’d hold its beak until it finally calmed down. Then he’d feed it something and it would hang out on his leg for a second. He trained a couple of them. He’d sit on the porch and play his guitar and his little skua friends would land by him.
Last I heard, someone saw him in a phone booth up here in Christchurch, but I never saw him again.
Can you tell me the penguin story again?
I was sleeping in the Jamesway and all of a sudden I heard this laughing and bumping down the hall. For a while I continued to hear giggling. Then I heard a noise that was not a human-made noise. I opened my curtain and saw a penguin frantically coming down the hall, a little Adelie penguin. Some guys picked up the penguin and threw it in bed with this guy who was wasted, and then took photos. One of them had snagged the penguin down by the water intake pipe. He threw it in a pillowcase and brought it up there.
What about the drugs? The cowboy and the cocaine?
There were so many drugs. The best drug story comes with the [winter] airdrop [in 1995]. Cocaine came down. Hash oil came down. Really good weed came down. Acid came down. Everything.
At airdrop, you light the barrels on the runway, and then everyone celebrates. When the plane flies over, all this crap starts flying out of the back. The parachute didn’t open on the load of freshies, so it blew up and made this big salad crater.
That night you’d walk down the hall and smell so many drugs. There were already people growing that winter, but more came in than ever.
There was this guy Trent. He had the hash oil and the cocaine. He’d get so blown on coke that he’d be running around with one cowboy boot on. One night Vicki and I were macking out on the back porch of 210 and we saw Trent. He was soused. He said, “I just did all these lines. I don’t give a fuck anymore. I’m going to find the highest thing in McMurdo and I’m going to jump off it.” So we watched him scurrying up the way wearing one cowboy boot. Cowboy boots in McMurdo don’t work, so he just kept eating shit on the ice. I thought, “That sucks, because if he goes and kills himself then there’s no more hash oil.”
He ended up getting busted. That was the “Just Say No” winter.
What about madness? Tell me about the hammer guy.
I met Glenn my first winter down there. He always acted really weird. One time Vicki and I were walking down the hall and Glenn sucked us into his room with, “Come here! Come here!” We hung out for a while and then he said, “I got this tape I want you guys to listen to.”
This was in the middle of the winter.
I thought it was some tunes or something. Later when we put the tape in, it was one of those audio tapes you buy to jack off to: “Fuck me in the ass! Harder, harder, harder!” I was sitting there with little Vicki, the Memphis Belle, trying to figure out how to deal with the tape because it disgusted her right off the bat. I stormtrooped down to Glenn’s room and said, “You sick motherfucker. I don’t know what you’re doing, man, but don’t give us this shit.” ‘Hotlix’ was the name of the tape. I gave it back to him. Anyway, that was when I first met Glenn.
I came back to McMurdo the next Winfly [when planes arrive in August, at the end of winter]. People were filling me in that there was some weird shit going on with Glenn and Tony [whom Glenn worked with in the kitchen]. One night Glenn and Tony invited me over to Tony’s room to hang out. Tony started getting lit and was telling me what was going on, right in front of Glenn. “Glenn’s been pulling some weird shit on me. He’s a fucking fag. Blah blah blah. He wants to try and fuck me in the ass.” Glenn said, “You know you like it, sweet cheeks.” All of a sudden Tony went into a rage. Glenn was sitting in the windowsill. He was the size of the whole window. Tony tried to push Glenn out the fucking window. He was trying to shove him, but Glenn was just stuck there. He was wedged.
Where was this?
This was on the third floor of 207. I finally left the room because they started talking about weird, weird stuff. It got creepy even for me.
So, a couple of days later–at the time I was the steward in the galley–I was restocking the food shelves when this girl came running back weeping, “It’s Glenn! It’s Glenn! He’s hitting everyone in the head with a hammer!” I had just got to work and I thought it was Big-Joke-On-Me day. I started laughing at her. But she was doing a good acting job, I thought. When I looked in her eyes I realized she wasn’t fucking around. She was bawling. So I ran into the galley. There was Joe laying on the ground. He had blood coming from the back of his neck. Tony was laying there holding his head. There was blood all over the place. There were a couple of knocked-over chairs, and one chair completely ripped apart.
Here’s what happened: The galley workers were sitting at the table eating lunch. They ate lunch earlier [than other departments, so they had the galley to themselves.] Glenn had gone to the Housing office and told Chuck, “I need to borrow a hammer.” Chuck gave him the hammer. Glenn took the hammer, left the Housing Office, walked up the stairs, walked into the galley, and walked up to the table where the galley workers were eating. They said hi to him and he went Whack! Whack! He hit Tony in the back of the skull twice with the hammer. Joe jumped up to stop him and he got the claw of the hammer in his neck. Dropped him instantly. Less than half an inch from his spine.
Then there was this old guy who looked like Ross Perot. In defense he picked up a chair to fight Glenn off like a big fucking grizzly bear–Glenn was about as tall as me but he weighed three hundred pounds–and Glenn just grabbed the chair and separated the cushion from the metal frame, just ripped it apart, and then the little Ross Perot guy just cowered off into the corner. You didn’t even want to sneeze near that old man because you were scared that you would blow him in half. And here he was, fighting off the hammer guy.
Another person at the table was Dave. Dave had just got there. It was his first day of work. United Airlines had lost both of his bags. Everything. So he had no clothes. He wore clothes from Skua all season. ['Skua' refers to the bin-and-pile-system of scavengable goods around town.] He was struggling and it was only his first day of work, when a dude walked up with a fucking hammer and took all these people out right in front of him. There were all these other classic characters at the table.
Matt was there. It was his first day in Antarctica and he was told to clean the blood off the galley chairs!
And to pick up the little blood-soaked paper kitchen hats. It was classic.
So anyway, I went running down the hall to find Glenn. I knew him so I thought I could talk him down if he was out hammering everyone. I was walking down the hallway waiting for him to jump out. This is back when it wasn’t the posh hallway. It was eery hallway. I’ve never been more scared in McMurdo. It was a windy storm outside. At the end of the hall, the door blew open in a swirl of snow, and I saw a big figure come in. It was Glenn, and he was walking toward me. The hair on my neck stood up. “Glenn,” I said. “Everything’s going to be cool. Just chill out. We need to talk. Everything’s going to be okay.” As he came closer I could hear that he was singing a song: “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. His eyes were just gone. He was staring beyond me, walking toward me, singing, “Mar-y had a lit-tle lamb.” Not fast, not too slow. “Mar-y had a lit-tle lamb.” And he had blood on him.
He didn’t have the hammer. After hammering them, he had taken the hammer back to Housing and gave it to Chuck, who just put it back under the desk. It still had blood on it. They might as well have had a “Hammer Return” slot.
Glenn bumped up next to me. I smelled booze. Glenn could put down a bottle of Crown [Royal whisky] before a night of drinking. The station manager ran up from behind and grabbed him. Right away the firemen come bustin’ in the back door and tethered him up and took him away. They locked him in Hut 10. They built a special door. We were all laughing because the FBI was going to come to McMurdo.
You said it has changed so much on the ice. Was there a turning point?
It’s just been a slow change, every time you go down there.
So now that it’s safer, you want to get out?
I don’t know what it is. It’s too convenient. It’s like back home. It’s changed from what was kind of adventurous to–it just kind of wore me out. When I worked in the freezer, it was dangerous climbing around in there. I would watch shit fall and think, “I’m going to die because a thousand-pound box of butt rounds will fall on me in the freezer one day.” It was that whole classic scenario. Now they have a racking system in there.
Someone ralphed all over the girls’ bathroom at the beginning of last season and it became a big thing. [Management] said that if it happened again, all the people in that dorm would be responsible for cleaning those bathrooms. Because one person threw up in the bathroom! Before, you’d just get a photo of the dude who did it. It would be posted in the hallway. “Charlie threw up! Charlie threw up!” Everyone would give him a hard time forever. And he would never want to puke again.
Now art is going up all over the walls. They had a 25-foot projector that they were going to have in the galley, they have stereo speakers mounted on the wall, a big-screen TV in there. And the clock, I’m sure you heard about the clock. The two-thousand-dollar piece-of-shit clock. It’s like Planet Hollywood in there.
