Born to Fish

by Tim Gallagher

  As the other fishermen motored away with him, Greg sat in shock, drenched to the skin, gazing sadly back to where his old Brockway had been cruising through the chop less than an hour earlier. A flood of memories came rushing back to him—all the great things he had done with that boat; all the places he’d been; all the mighty striped bass he’d fought and landed with it. Was it really over? How would he ever be able to get by? The near-daily trips on his boat were such an essential escape valve for him, the only time he felt truly alive and free. Sure, he could scrounge rides with his friends on fishing boats, but it wouldn’t be the same. He craved being able to go out fishing alone whenever things were bothering him, and that avenue was now closed to him, just when he needed it most.

  “I immediately started thinking, How am I going to get back on the water?” said Greg. “Because I need to be there; I need to be on the water.” The thought of being stranded on land filled him with anxiety.

  The fishermen who rescued him didn’t want to go back to the harbor right away, so Greg spent the day in his wet clothes, fishing with them. They finally took him ashore at Groton, Connecticut. One of the men had to drive near Greg’s house, so he dropped him off there.

  Greg didn’t tell his parents anything about what happened that day. Losing his boat was such a profound shock, he didn’t know what to say, and the situation with his father made everything more difficult. Herb had recently started begging Greg to take his life. “Every time I saw him, he was asking me to kill him,” he said. “It was a painful time.”

  As his father became more and more ill, Greg’s tension increased markedly, and after losing his boat, he no longer had a constructive way to deal with his anxiety. He began drinking heavily, often putting away a liter of Jim Beam or Tanqueray a night, and abusing a variety of drugs: cocaine, barbiturates, and amphetamines. He was still underage, only eighteen years old, but he would sit at the local bar drinking, and no one dared ask him for his ID. Something had changed in him.

  “I used to be someone who really never wanted to fight anyone—someone who didn’t even like confrontation,” said Greg. “I was more into fishing and trapping and spending as much time as I could out in the woods.”

  Then one day, as he sat quietly drinking alone in the bar, an old nemesis of Greg’s walked in. He was a couple of years older than Greg and had tormented him mercilessly in junior high, sometimes slapping him hard in the face as they passed in the hallway, just for the hell of it. He was a huge man now and worked in a factory in New Haven. His shift had just ended and he’d stopped at the bar for a drink. Without being asked, the bartender gave him a double Scotch, which he downed instantly, then slammed the glass back down on the bar and nodded for the bartender to fill it again. He was drinking his second Scotch when he happened to glance at Greg, sitting three stools down from him at the bar.

  “Oh, fuck! Is that you?” he said. “Little Greggie?” And he slapped Greg hard, right in the face. “Just like old times, huh?”

  Greg felt an unstoppable rage coursing through his body and punched the man as hard as he could, landing a devastating blow to his face, followed by another and another and another, pummeling him endlessly, breaking bones in his face, spattering blood and spit and snot everywhere until the man lay senseless on the barroom floor.

  “That was the first time I ever snapped and started throwing punches like that,” said Greg. “After that, I never had a fear about fighting anyone.” At that instant, Greg had become his father’s son.

  * * *

  The Phantom

  Greg was an All-State and All-American football player in high school, and after his stunning performance in the championship game, many major college athletic programs aggressively courted him. One coach even bribed Scott Jackson to try to talk Greg into taking the full-ride scholarship deal they were offering at their university. Scott happily took the money and spent it with Greg.

  Dave Myerson remembers the phone calls well. “Once I was in the house and the phone rang, and it was Johnny Majors, the head coach at Tennessee at the time, and he was calling because they were trying to recruit my brother.”

  During his final semester of high school, Greg was often called up to the office to take a call from some college or other that wanted him on their team. The administrators and faculty at Lyman Hall High School were very supportive, excited that one of their students had such a great opportunity before him. But Greg took advantage of them. On the days he went to the office to take a phone call, he would often just leave school, skipping the rest of the day instead of going back to his classes.

  Greg turned down some of the top colleges in the country and chose instead to attend the University of Rhode Island. Some people, like his brother Dave, were surprised he took their scholarship offer instead of going with one of the powerhouse schools that were courting him.

  “He had Tennessee, Penn State, and these other great schools interested in him, and he opted for Rhode Island,” said Dave. “It was a surprise for me, but I know he was always more comfortable with URI. It was closer to home, and it was a place where he could fish for striped bass—which is actually what probably drove it all.”

  Greg agrees with Dave’s assessment. Although he did have a guarantee from URI that he would be a starter in his first year, what really clinched the deal was the school’s close proximity to excellent striped bass fishing.

  But Greg’s time at the University of Rhode Island didn’t start well. Even before the semester began, he had a bad experience at the end of the summer football training camp. The new recruits were staying in a dormitory on campus, and on Rookie Night, the last night of camp, everyone in the football program got dressed up and went to the Galley Beach Club for dinner. Afterward, the seniors put the new recruits through hazing hell, screaming at them, stripping them naked, hitting them with paddles, then locking them all up in a bathroom in the dark. Then they took them out one by one and made them stand under a single light bulb as they taunted and humiliated them. Each of them had to put an act on in front of the team, trying to entertain them and make them laugh. Regardless of what they did, each freshman met with the same fate: the seniors pelted them with a sticky, disgusting substance they’d mixed together.

  “It was some revolting blend of rotten eggs, molasses, and maybe piss, shit, tobacco spit, tomatoes—whatever they could find—whipped together into a stinking mess,” said Greg.

  When it was his turn, he was defiant. He flipped them off and yelled, “Fuck you!” Someone instantly smashed him just above his eye with a rotten egg, and his head swelled up.

  “Over my eye, I had a big welt. Then they started pelting me with that sticky stuff.”

  When it was over, all twelve of them knelt on the ground, six on each side, facing each other, covered in gooey brown goop—but their initiation was over. By that time, Greg had had it. He just wanted to get out of there and drive nonstop all the way home. He tried to wipe off the sticky goop, but it was hopeless. He couldn’t even put his clothes on, so he gathered them up in a bundle, walked out to his pickup truck, and sped away buck-naked into the night.

  Greg was driving close to ninety miles an hour when a state trooper pulled him over. It was nearly midnight. The trooper walked up to his truck and shone a flashlight inside, illuminating Greg’s naked, goop-smeared body.

  “You been drinking?” he asked.

  “No, I just had the worst fucking night of my life.”

  “Yeah, well why don’t you tell me about it?”

  And Greg proceeded to lay out the events of the evening in exacting detail. The trooper was silent for a few seconds, and Greg couldn’t see his face. “You’re going to have to wait here a minute,” he finally said and walked back to his squad car. Several minutes later another state trooper drove up—and then another . . . and another . . . and another.

  “They all walked up to my truck, and I was sitting there, looking straight ahead,” said Greg. “They’ve got flashlights shining on me. I’ve go
t shit in my hair . . . shit all over me. And they’re fucking laughing at me. I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah; very funny.’ And they’re like, ‘All right, get the fuck out of here.’ ”

  When Greg got home, Herb did his best to help him wash, limping outside with a bucket, a bar of soap, and a brush, and holding a garden hose over Greg as he knelt in the yard, trying to scrub himself clean. He scoured himself until he bled, but it was hopeless.

  “I don’t even know what it was, but I couldn’t get it off,” he said. “I finally had to shave my head.” He was furious with his teammates. “After that, I was on a rampage of terror, taking them all out, one at a time, in practice. I was brutal. They were very afraid.”

  When Greg moved into his URI dormitory a couple weeks later, things didn’t go much better. Scott Jackson drove him there in his pickup truck, and he had a beer keg in back with a tube running into the cab that they could drink from. By the time they reached URI, Greg was so drunk he could barely walk. He staggered into his dorm and sprawled out on the first bed he came to. Scott carried all of Greg’s things into the dorm, left them stacked beside the bed, and drove back to Connecticut without another word.

  When the semester started, Greg rarely showed up at classes and sometimes even missed team practice. He spent most days fishing and most nights drinking, smoking pot, or snorting coke. The head coach started calling him the Phantom, because he never knew where he was and when he might show up. One day the coach was sitting on the seawall at Narragansett Beach, drinking a cup of coffee, when he noticed Greg standing in the surf with his fishing rod, casting again and again into the surging water. Later, at practice, the coach confronted him about it.

  “How were your classes today?” he asked.

  “Oh, pretty good,” said Greg. “Normal stuff.”

  “Yeah, well, I saw you fishing all day at Narragansett. I watched you.”

  From then on, the coach sent two huge football players to wake Greg up every morning, go to breakfast with him, and escort him to his first class.

  “It did help,” said Greg. “But a lot of times, if the fishing was good, I’d go to the first class and then take off.”

  Still, Greg was an excellent football player, and that mitigated a lot of his problems with the coaching staff. In one of his first games for URI, he made one of the best plays of his entire football career. The other team was about to punt on a third down, and Greg went in for the block, leapt right over the center the instant the ball was hiked, and dashed toward the punter.

  “There were two guys in front of the punter, and I lowered down like I was going to hit them,” said Greg. “But instead, I jumped over them and blocked the punt.” In doing so, Greg flipped over in the air and landed on his back with the wind knocked out of him. But URI had possession of the ball on the other team’s twenty-yard line, and they scored on the next play.

  One of Greg’s first close friendships at URI was with Bear Judkins, another player on the varsity football team. But they didn’t hit it off so well at the start.

  “We first met at rookie orientation for football at URI, and I hated him,” said Bear. “I just thought he was obnoxious and arrogant, and I didn’t like him at all. Then one day he opened up to me, and we started becoming friends. He told me lots of stories about when he was growing up, and about his father, who was a gangster, but when I met him he had Parkinson’s disease and was pretty sick.”

  Greg and Bear started working out together and had their own running route they went on several times a week. They would take fishing rods with them and run along the Rhode Island shoreline from the Coast Guard House Restaurant in Narragansett Beach all the way down around Hazard Rock and Black Point to Scarborough Beach, racing each other across boulders and climbing up rocky outcroppings until they couldn’t run another step, while the waves pounded relentlessly beside them, splashing up and covering them with salt spray. Then they’d stop and fish for a while until they were rested enough to run again.

  * * *

  The Rattler

  In the summer after his first year at the University of Rhode Island, when he was nineteen, Greg went home to his parents’ condo and started working for an electrical contractor who did a lot of jobs at Yale University. Greg’s uncle, an electrical union foreman, had helped him get hired, and he was perfect for the job. He knew where everything was located on campus because of all the time he’d spent there in high school, hanging around with his brother Dave and his friends, so the company hired him to make deliveries to their various work sites and to do other odd jobs around the shop.

  The company was in a particularly bad part of New Haven, wracked by gang violence and drug abuse—mostly crack cocaine, which was then reaching epidemic levels. It was a grim place. Greg often felt as though he was traveling through a war zone as he drove to and from the shop; shootings and stabbings were commonplace, and a couple of times people threw bricks at his windshield when he passed. Each morning, one of his first tasks was to sweep up all the empty crack vials that accumulated every night in the parking lot. But doing this kind of mindless work gave Greg plenty of time to think. It was here that he first began experimenting with the idea of creating a sound-producing sinker.

  Greg had already been dissecting the stomachs of the large striped bass he was catching, trying to find out exactly what they were eating. He discovered that the largest bass were often feeding on lobsters—and suddenly it all made sense. A bass would have to be of a certain size to have jaws strong enough to crunch through the tough lobster shells; smaller bass simply were not big enough to eat them. This was great to know, but how could he use it to catch these giant bass? He became obsessed with finding the answer.

  He wondered how the fish found the lobsters. The kinds of places lobsters frequent tend to have poor visibility, so he doubted they could spot them by eye. And the fish’s sense of smell probably wouldn’t be sufficient to find them in the churning waters surrounding reefs, jetties, and rocky shorelines. Could it be that the stripers heard the rattle of the lobsters’ carapaces as they shuffled across the rocks, foraging for food?

  To find out, Greg set up a 200-gallon saltwater fish tank with a granite bottom in the living room and released several live lobsters in it that he’d bought at a fish market. He would sit beside the aquarium for hours with a medical stethoscope pressed tightly against the glass, listening intently to the sounds of the lobsters. He found that whenever they moved, their carapaces would make a clicking or rattling sound. It finally dawned on him what he needed to do—he would figure out a way to mimic that sound, which would attract only fish large enough to eat lobsters, just the bass he most wanted to catch. But would any kind of rattling noise do? Greg had his doubts, so he bought an acoustic-metering device, which enabled him to determine the exact frequency and decibel level of the sounds.

  Greg knew that the idea of using sound to attract big stripers had a lot of merit, if he could just figure out how to do it. He thought about it a lot while he was at work. One morning, as he was sweeping up crack vials, he had a revelation. What if he put tiny ball bearings inside the glass vials to create miniature rattles? He set out immediately to see if it would work. First he cleaned the vials out thoroughly with Q-tips, then he filled them with ball bearings of varying sizes and shapes. He then rattled them underwater to see which ones worked best.

  Fortunately, Greg had become good friends with his boss, Joe, who allowed him to work on his own projects when business was slow at the shop. So Greg experimented with the rattle vials almost every day. After determining the best size and configuration of ball bearings to use in the vials to re-create the sounds of lobsters, Greg figured he could attach them to the end of his fishing line to use as a sound-producing sinker. But there was a problem: the glass vials would quickly get broken on the rocks. His solution was to get a large lead fishing sinker, bore a hole in it big enough to accommodate a crack vial, slip the vial inside, and cover it up with lead.

  “We had a drill pre
ss in the back of the shop,” said Greg. “I built a wooden jig to hold the sinker in place while I drilled a hole in it the perfect size for a crack vial. I’d put ball bearings into the vial, then slip it into the sinker and tamp lead over it. You couldn’t even see it. My sinker looked like everyone else’s, except mine made a clicking noise.”

  So someone looking in Greg’s tackle box wouldn’t even know there was anything special in there—which was a crucial consideration. Greg had recently started going on nighttime fishing trips with a couple other electricians who worked for the company. He had borrowed a boat from his old friends, the Carlsons, and he and the others would take it out in Long Island Sound almost every night, sometimes going all the way to Block Island and sleeping there in the boat. They were very competitive, always trying to outdo each other in fishing. Often they would bet to see who would catch the biggest or most fish, which gave Greg a great incentive to work on his rattle sinker. He was convinced it would give him an unbeatable edge.

  “At night we would go fishing in deep water for striped bass using a three-way technique like I do now,” said Greg. “But I was trying to figure out how to get the fish to come to my bait and not my friends’ bait. I figured it had to be noise, but it couldn’t be noticeable.”