Once lost, an old sailor has found his bearings

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BALTIMORE (Map, News) - It wasn't losing the career that defined him — a life at sea, one he was good at and had enjoyed for three decades — that got Mark Wain's attention.

Or being locked up again and again for the kind of stupid stuff that derails a particularly knuckleheaded teenager. It wasn't even the humiliation of a middle-age able-bodied seaman taking a low-rung job at McDonald's for free cheeseburgers and beer money.

Waking up in the bushes with a vicious hangover for the millionth time and realizing he was almost 50 years old led the chronic alcoholic toward a fragile recovery.

“I was just doing the street thing from town to town, screwing up over and over,” he said, noting that he was also getting the bad end of drunken brawls. “In the back of my head, I knew — ‘You can’t live this way anymore.”’

For the past month, Wain has been living with other people — mostly fellow service veterans — trying as best they can to not live that way anymore.

I met Mark Wain over the summer of 2002 when we sailed together on the Atlantic Guardian, a cable ship that docked at Fort McHenry. On Feb. 8, I filed a Storyteller column wondering what became of him after our last, somewhat dramatic encounter.

In the fall of 2004, Wain had just found out that the Coast Guard would not allow him to go to sea anymore, citing a long record as a habitual drunk and petty criminal.

[The son of a small-town police chief in far eastern Ohio, Wain gets the urge to fight cops when he drinks.]

Bombed — or “saturated,” as he puts it — Wain was dealing with the end of his seafaring days by trying to set fire to his clothes in my backyard in Greektown. I chased him away with a shovel. And that was the last I saw or heard from him for three years.

This past January, Wain's brother Gary contacted me from his home in Georgia, asking if I knew where Mark might be. I didn’t but wrote a story detailing how the Coast Guard had it in for delinquent seaman — not quite the redundancy it once was, but somewhat applicable — as part of a post 9/11 campaign called Operation Drydock.

And then the thing happened that every writer hopes for after publishing something they believe is important. The world responded, this time in the guise of a guy with a laptop computer at a coffee shop near the Veteran's Administration hospital in Long Beach, Calif.

“I think I just talked to your friend,” said the man in an e-mail to The Examiner. “He asked me to look up his name on the Internet, and your column popped up. He says to let everyone know he’s alive.”

Wain, who doesn't remember asking a stranger to “Google” his name, was probably trying to find out what states to avoid. I was back in Los Angeles at the end of the TV writers’ strike and drove down to Long Beach to look for him.

With the help of a compassionate VA social worker, I found him — newly sober, going to A.A. meetings (something he's done on and off for years) and living in a homeless shelter. After a couple weeks of flying right, the VA accepted Wain into the Long Beach Veterans Village Recovery Center.

Officially known as Domiciliary Residential Rehabilitation and Treatment, the live-in rehab exists at VA centers across the country, including Perry Point in Cecil County. If it wasn’t for the VA, which didn't give up on him long after most everyone else did, he'd surely be dead.

So now what for the irascible Wain?

He is one of the most intelligent people I've met on either side of a diploma. Although his body has taken a beating, his mechanical skills are keen, and when he's able to get in touch with a bit of humility instead of the hard end of an espantoon, he's charming.

And no one tells a better sea story.

If he stays sober and discovers that he wants something more than he wants a drink, just about anything is possible. If not, the inevitable.

“I was thinking of maybe working with the Sea Scouts,” he said, having seen a schooner — and smitten as all sea dogs are by such a sight — with young kids learning the ropes.

Fair winds, my friend.

Rafael Alvarez is an author and screenwriter based in Baltimore and Los Angeles. His books — fiction, journalism and essays — include “The Fountain of Highlandtown” and “Storyteller.” He can be reached at ralvarez@baltimoreexaminer.com.

SEE THE LATEST ON THIS STORY

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65 days ago: Playing a Gotham game of ‘Give & Take’

165 days ago: Highlandtown hot dogs — from the heart

172 days ago: Rotary’s commitment to peace

179 days ago: Centennial quilt patches together Linthicum’s suburban history

» 186 days ago: Once lost, an old sailor has found his bearings «

193 days ago: Hope springs eternal, except in Birdland

200 days ago: Fan keeps museum dream alive

207 days ago: Good ideas to put a spring in our step

214 days ago: Old neighborhood exchange lives on

221 days ago: Music for working, blue-collar cats