Read A Captain's Duty for Free Online Page A

play because I have to be in the band.’” Coach Marshall hated me after that.
    I guess I did have something to learn about being part of a team.
    I loved sports, but I bucked against the restrictions. It was the same with basketball. The JV coach called me and a guy named Gunk Johnson after a practice early in the season and turned to me first and said, “Phillips, I’m not going to play youbecause your father didn’t play me when I was a student. And Gunk, I’m not going to play you because I don’t like you.” He thought he’d run us out of there. When the coach asked us what we were going to do, Gunk and I looked at each other and then I said, “Coach, we’re gonna stick.”
    That was my motto: I’m gonna stick. Especially if you try to push me.
    I guess right then you’d have pegged me for the merchant marine. Every guy I met in the merchant marine had stories like that. We weren’t the kids who made class president. We were the guys who rode beat-up motorcycles to school, played the offensive line, and drank in the Fells, the nearby woods where all the kids hung out. We went our own way. We were the square pegs someone tried to smash into a round hole and said, “Nope, not gonna do it.”
    In 1975, I was well on my way to fulfilling my detractor’s prediction that I wouldn’t do very much with my life. I’d had a few jobs, working as a security guard at Raytheon, shuttling checks to the Federal Reserve from the local banks, and driving a taxi. I was a hack in Arlington, a town north of Boston. It didn’t have much of a future, but it was colorful. One time a guy I’d never seen before jumped in my cab, gave me an address, and told me he had to go in and get the money. I pulled around back, expecting him to try to pull a fast one on me, but within a minute a woman came screaming out the door and jumped in a car, followed by this maniac. He jumped in my cab and screamed, “I’ll give you twenty bucks if you can catch her.” It was clear to me that the man and the woman were caught up in some wild domestic drama—which I never got to the bottom of—and I’d suddenly landed in the middleof it. I hit the gas and we went through the streets of Arlington like the chase scene from Bullitt . Finally I pulled even with the woman and saw her terrified face through the window. That’s when my fare yelled, “Run her off the road!” Apparently, he thought I was a hit man, not a cab driver. I pulled over, collected my $20 for catching her, then threw him out of the cab.
    I learned a lot. It’s a tough job and you can’t go by the book; you have to use your imagination. But I had no real direction, no real plan for myself in life. I’d gone to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, mainly because my parents were both teachers and wanted me to give college a shot. I’d studied animal science, because I wanted to be a vet. But one class, in which I had to use a slide rule, told me I wasn’t cut out for college. I dropped out after my first semester, the victim of too much partying, too many girls, and not enough hitting the books. If there was anything wild going on at that campus in the fall of 1974, I was probably around it.
    So I became a taxi driver. And one day I was coming out the back way of Logan Airport when I picked up a sharp-looking guy with pressed dungarees and a leather jacket that looked like it cost a thousand bucks. I was impressed. “Where you going?” I asked the guy. “I want some action,” he said. Not an unusual request in the city of Boston in the mid-seventies.
    “What kind of action are you looking for?”
    “I want booze and I want broads,” he said.
    “Okay, I can do that,” I said. I cranked the meter and headed for the Combat Zone, which in those days was a single street packed with college girl revues and blazing neon signs even during the day. You could get anything in the Combat Zone, and I mean anything. You want a double-jointed Romanian girl whoplays