“Slime Line is a stone-cold winner: a book about the dirty work of capitalism, searching for a missing father, and reckoning with your legacy. It’s full of fish guts and lousy shifts, but it’s also driven by a big, beating heart. I found it impossible to put down. As in all great books, the big catch here is the truth, and Jake Maynard hauls it in, one gorgeous sentence after another. Tender, musical, sad, funny as hell. Read it.” —Steve Almond, author of All the Secrets of the World and Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow
From the Publisher: “Equal parts workplace satire and character study in delusion, Slime Line is a fresh and urgently needed examination of work, grief, the male ego, and the false promise of environmental capitalism.
A fresh and trippy portrait of the diverse underclass of the commercial fishing industry, Slime Line is a tragicomedy of one college dropout’s attempts to remake himself into a hard-nosed workingman.
Fleeing the aftermath of a bizarre college prank and mourning the death of his deadbeat dad, Garrett Deaver escapes Pennsylvania for a salmon processing plant in remote Alaska, a state he has only known from his father’s stories. There he renames himself Beaver–just like a beaver, he’s ‘an industrious motherf*cker’–and he connives to become a supervisor at Klak Fancy Salmon, LLC, thinking it will solve his psychological and financial issues. He soon falls in with an entrepreneurial Turkish fish processor and a cynical old woman who mends nets and tells filthy jokes. In these two, he finds solidarity, or even friendship, for the first time in his life.
But the methamphetamines Garrett uses to work long hours delude his thinking, and an old photo on the wall of a bar contradicts his dad’s stories. When sabotage at the plant sets his new friends at odds with management and an ensuing act of violence disrupts his schemes, Garrett is set on a path toward reckoning with his dad’s secret legacy and the mythos of rugged individualism he’d always believed…”
More info About the Author: Jake Maynard is a writer from rural Pennsylvania whose stories and essays appear in Guernica, Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Electric Lit, The New Republic, The New York Times, and others. His experiences working in the commercial fishing industry inspired his debut novel, Slime Line.
Author Site Don’t miss out: The book launch party for Slime Line will be at Bottlerocket Social Hall on June 5th (doors open at 5pm, show starts at 7:30). Featured readers include Jake Maynard, grace gilbert, and Glenn Taylor with peformances by Dave Shepherd, Zach Bryson, and Flip McGuire!
Event Info “Maynard is a bold new American voice in fiction, and he’s arrived with a fillet knife. Christ I loved this book.” —Taylor Brown, author of Rednecks and Gods of Howl Mountain.
“A cult classic is born. Jake Maynard’s inspiring Slime Line is a backward glance at what the American novel could achieve before it got highjacked by English departments. Stumbling through the stinking grist of the salmon processing slums, written with fish-gut fingers, and fueled by an impetuous, chemical verve of prose a la Thom Jones, Slime Line exposes Alaska’s wage-slave work camps via the addled observations of its indefatigable narrator, one Garrett Deaver, a kid wielding a filet knife manically passionate about a job that will leave him beaten, abandoned, and hiding from the police inside a floating trailer park while still attempting to solve the mystery of his father’s death. Sinclair and Steinbeck would applaud this novel’s eye, but it’s Maynard’s outrageous characters loosed upon the Alaskan seacoast that propel Slime Line into page-turning madness. Maynard gets every word right.” —Lee Durkee, author of The Last Taxi Driver and Stalking Shakespeare.
“Maynard’s Slime Line is an arresting read that sinks its claws deep into your gut and dares you to blink. It’s a story of hard work, loss, exploitation, and family set against a backdrop of blood, ice, and heavy machinery at an Alaskan fish processing plant peopled by misfits, scoundrels, and ghosts. You’ll never look at a salmon filet the same way again.” —Kim Kelly, author of Fight Like Hell: The Untold Story of American Labor
“A bold and forceful and glorious book, like a beer bottle smashed to bits over your head, leaving you sticky with glass shards. Jake Maynard’s Slime Line depicts the world how it really is, or one hard slice of it anyway: the puke-inducing Alaskan commercial fishing sector. You’ll learn how to gut a salmon in one chapter, then how to lose a family in the next. In both cases, it’s not pretty. (“Everything,” as Maynard tells it, “comes out clean except for the heart.”) This is an eviscerating read, at once improbably raw and real.” — Ben Purkert, author of The Men Can’t be Saved
“Slime Line is a deeply compelling novel. Maynard’s energetic prose is as gritty and raw as Alaska itself.” —Callan Wink, author of August
“There aren’t enough gross books about work. This is a story that hasn’t yet been told, and thank goodness Maynard was in right place to bear witness and tell it. Slime Line is a wild romp, both compelling and educational. It will change how people approach fish processing—and work, even—in Alaska.” —Brendan Jones, author of The Alaskan Laundry
The Klak Fancy Letter
Wednesday, June 7th
Hello! Hola! Nihao! Buna! Czesc! Halo!
Welcome to the Klak Fancy Salmon, LLC. This daily announcement will update you on important news at the processing facility. You will also get our fish counts and info about FISH 101 Bonuses. With the start of the 2006 salmon season just days away, the crew at Klak Fancy is busy making sure we’re ready to have a safe—and profitable!!!—season.
Rules to Remember:
*You must be processing fish by the official start of your shift! The start time isn’t the time that you clock in! The start time is the latest possible time that you can begin working. Therefore, you must clock in at least 9 minutes before your shift. If you clock in 5 minutes before your shift, you’re late! When you’re late, your pay is reduced by 15 minutes.
*Respect private property! This includes fishing vessels and all the homes in and around Klak. You can walk on the beach but steer clear of the tidal flats because the mud can be dangerous.
*Watch out for bears! We will only have a few hours of darkness each night, but be especially watchful at night.
*Conserve water and limit your showers! Once the season starts, you’ll be too tired to shower, anyway. You might as well get used to it.
*Klak Fancy Salmon is alcohol-free. Cigarettes and international phone cards can be purchased at the company store, open during every break.
Fish Processed: 0 (But not for long, of course!)
Weather: High of 52, light rain. Sunrise—5:21 a.m. Sunset—11:30 p.m.
Alaska Word of the Day: Sockeye—The type of salmon you’ll mostly process. Sockeye travel from the deep ocean through Bristol Bay each year to spawn. Last year, fishermen caught nearly 25 million sockeye in Bristol Bay.
One
The spring season’s over and the herring are finished. We’ve squeezed out the eggs for a Japanese grocery store chain and flaked off the scales for some cosmetic company to grind into lip gloss. It made me feel good on the tired days to know someone, somewhere, was smearing my work on their lips. Maybe even a flake of my skin, a barb of hair, a drop of blood. The most important season of my tiny life hasn’t even started, and who knows how much of me is already spread out across the world?
Honestly I’m not even sure where the Excellent Fillets and Great Fillets and Very Good Fillets ended up after we sorted and glazed and froze and shipped them. Someone’s fridge, I guess. Yours? All the bonus parts—the bones and heads, the fins and flabby bits—that shit got swept into the chummer and ground into a slurry to be baked into pet food at a plant down the road. Fishmeal’s the industry term. We call it the gravy.
But now the chummer’s steel lips are sealed. The vacuum sealers, the header and gutter, the power-knives, the propane-powered forklifts, stinking like the stomach flu—all of it shut down. Even the crew packed their shit and flew back to Anchorage. Then Fairbanks, Seattle, Bogota, Manila, wherever. Not me. Where else would I even go? They let me stick around and clean the cannery.
It’s not actually a cannery—remember: flash-freezing preserves freshness!—but that’s the word the old guys use. Processor’s the most accurate. When I practice explaining it to people back home, I think of it like a fish factory. But that’s not quite right either. It’s the opposite, a factory in reverse. Fish are taken apart. Meat gets made that way. On disassembly lines.
That came to me yesterday when I was laying belly-up scrubbing a month’s worth of pasty herring gunk from underneath a conveyor and a scale flicked off the brush and went so far up my nose I had to spit it out. There’s no way to describe that smell so there’s no point in trying.
If that gives you the icks you won’t like it when the freezers get thawed out. There’s six of them, box-truck-sized, and during the season fish and water and blood freeze on the floor, six inches thick. Yesterday I flipped the OFF switch and propped open the heavy doors. And now, right now, I’m shoveling out what’s left. A million little mammoths in their own thawing permafrost.
Can you believe I used to be squeamish? I wouldn’t even scrounge for quarters in the couch cushions because of the crumbs and pubes. The wet wads of hair in the shower drain used to make me sick. One time I literally yakked because of a dead deer in my dad’s pickup. But disgust is a feeling you can swallow. Look at me, Exhibit A, ankle-deep in the goop. This yellow raingear with tiny scales stuck to my goggles. What would my dad think of me now? In the dull days he snaps at me. There’s slobber hanging from his jaws. I smack his nose. I tell him to lift his leg someplace else. This is my life. This is my me. This is the world that was made for me.
There’s no way else to explain it. Soon I’ll be a salaried foreman at one of Alaska’s premier sockeye salmon processing facilities. Soon I’ll be paying off my credit card. I’ll earn clipboards for hands and a megaphone throat. I’ll get my own crew of cannery newbies, flown to Klak from around the world, passports and work visas mashed into their palms. They’ll be so lost, poor little fuckers, just like I was, ogling at the spongy taiga, the staggered trees, the scrapped machines, the trailers, the hitchhikers walking through the rain, the alders with trash bags clinging like flags saying I-Give-Up, and those foreign kids might say in their own language, this looks fuck-all like the brochure.
So what. It’s better. Klak Fancy Salmon, LLC. We produce first-rate, ethically sourced, wild-caught herring and salmon, just fucking dripping with heart-healthy Omega 3s. And me? I’m Garrett Deaver and I’m twenty-two years old and I’m about to climb this ladder. Some people here call me Deaver the Beaver, or Beaver, or Beav, which are all fine, because just like a beaver, I am an industrious motherfucker.
The past—men were men were men, amen. My dad was a commercial fisherman but he gave me shit directions north. Then he dove off a balcony, split his head. That was almost three months ago but this is about me. And really, it’s about fish in the way that everything here is about fish. Nobody’ll tell me exactly when the salmon will show and even the scientists can’t say how they make it from the Pacific. Supposedly some combo of sunlight, and the smell of their home streams floating way out in the ocean, and the magnetite in their skulls working like a compass. Magnetite! They got coordinates lodged in their peanut brains.
People keep telling me that, like it’s some big moral.
This excerpt is published here courtesy of the author and the publisher and should not be reprinted without permission.
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