Captain Phil Harris by Josh Harris, Jake Harris

swagger, he proclaimed, “I’m worth it.”
    Phil handed the nugget and chain back to Mary and asked for one more chance.
    He got it. Mary filed for divorce, sold her house, and, just a month after they met, agreed to move in with Phil.
    He was overjoyed, even though he wasn’t going to be there. It was May, start of another crab season. Alaska and the lush fishing grounds awaited him.
    Phil would be gone for four and a half months, but, nevertheless, he wanted Mary to live at his place. He’d toss his two roommates out, he told Mary, giving her and Meigon some privacy. Mary’s son, Shane, was already gone, having moved in with his biological dad.
    “I’ve got eighty-eight thousand dollars in the bank, and you can have access to it,” Phil said. “You can do whatever you want to this house to make it livable for you and your kid. I hope you’ll be here when I get back.”
    “Are you insane?” said Mary. “You don’t even know me and you would trust me with all that money? I don’t believe you.”
    “Everyone told him he was crazy, that he had lost his mind,” Mary later recalled. “I was a dancer, for goodness’ sakes. They all told him that I would steal him blind.”
    Phil’s father, whose opinion he always sought, told him, “I wouldn’t advise leaving her with all your money, but it’s your money. Do whatever you want.”
    Phil depended on his instinct. That’s what had kept him alive on the Bering Sea. And his instinct was to trust her.
    But before opening his account and his heart to Mary, Phil told her there was one stipulation: she had to stop dancing. Phil said it made him too jealous.
    Fine, said Mary, but she had her own demands: “No more Harleys in the house, no more shooting guns in or around the property, no more coke parties, no more coke whores hanging around for drugs, no more drunks camping out on the premises overnight.”
    A deal was struck. The next day, Phil took Mary to his bank and put her name on his account.
    After Phil left, Mary assumed things would calm down, but it wasn’t long before she heard a motorcycle come roaring up to the house and found a gargantuan figure on her doorstep.
    Frightened, she called Phil on his boat and asked him what to do.
    “What does this guy look like?” Phil asked.
    “He’s about seven feet tall,” said Mary, “weighs around four hundred pounds, and he’s all hairy and stuff.”
    “Oh, that’s just Joey,” Phil said. “He’s all right.”
    •   •   •
    With Phil back at work on the Bering Sea, Mary went to work on the house. She had plenty of time; Phil’s prolonged absence would be the longest stretch they would be apart during their years together.
    First priority: the gun. Phil kept a .44 Magnum haphazardly slung over his bedpost. As a fishing vessel captain, Phil was rigid with safety procedures on his boat, but he was not the least bit careful when on land. So out went the Magnum, eventually winding up on Phil’s boat.
    Mary also moved the tools that Phil had stuffed in kitchen drawers into the garage and had the carpet ripped out, the wood floors redone, and ceramic tile installed. Then she topped the whole project off with a new paint job, both inside and out. The man cave was turning into a home.
    Phil may have been at sea, but his thoughts constantly wandered back to the girl he’d left behind. He called Mary so much from his boat that the phone bill averaged $750 a month.
    In those days, communication was ship to shore, and thus all the vessels in the fishing fleet could listen in while Phil was burning up the lines back to Mary. His fellow captains teased Phil no end about his new woman, referring to his ship as the Love Boat.
    While Mary loved the attention, she wondered if Phil would still be so lovey-dovey after he saw what she had done to his house. What if he throws me out like he did his ex-girlfriend? Mary wondered.
    As she drove to the airport to pick him up upon his return, she was nervous.
    She