Then we invented outboard motors and all that science was made irrelevant by raw power. You could turn a bathtub into a high-performance speedboat by bolting a big enough motor on it. When the throttle’s up high, the impact of the water against the bottom of the hull lifts it right up out of the water. It skims like a skipping rock and who gives a fuck about hydrodynamics. When you throttle it down, the vessel sinks into the water again and wallows like a hog.
This is the principle behind the Zodiac, as far as I can tell. You take a vessel that probably weighs less than its own motor, you radio the control tower at Logan Airport and you take off.
We had a forty-horse on this puppy—a donation—and I’d never dared to throttle it up past about twenty-five percent of maximum. Remember that a VW Bug has an engine with less than thirty horsepower. When you hit running speed in this Zode, if the water’s not too rough, the entire boat rises from the water. The only wet part is the screw.
It’s the ultimate Boston transportation. On land, there’s the Omni, but all these slow cars get in the way. There’s public transit—the T—but if you’re in good shape, it’s usually faster to walk. Bicycles aren’t bad. But on water nothing stops you, and there isn’t anything important in Boston that isn’t within two blocks of being wet. The Harbor and the city are interlocked like wrestling squid, tentacles of water and land snaking off everywhere, slashed with bridges or canals.
Contrary to what every bonehead believes, the land surface has been stretched out and expanded by civilization. Look at any downtown city: what would be a tiny distance on a backpacking trip becomes a transcontinental journey. You spend hours traveling just a few miles. Your mental map of the city grows and stretches until things seem far away. But get on a Zodiac, and the map snaps back into place like a rubber sheet that has been pulled out of shape. Want to go to the airport? Zip. It’s right over there. Want to cross the river? Okay, here we are. Want to get from the Common to B.U., two miles away, during rush hour, right before a playoff game at Fenway Park? Most people wouldn’t even try. On a Zodiac, it’s just two miles. Five minutes. The real distance, the distance of Nature. I’m no stoned-out naturehead with a twelve-string guitar, but that’s a fact.
The Mercury was brand-new, not even broken in. Some devious flack at the outboard motor company had noticed that our Zodiacs spent a lot of time in front of TV cameras. So we get all our motors free now, in exchange for being our extroverted selves. We wear them out, sink, burn and break them; new ones materialize. I hooked up the fuel line, pumped it up, and the motor caught on the first try. The stench of the piers was sliced by exhaust. I dropped it to a tubercular idle, shifted into forward, and started snaking out between the pilings. If I wanted to commit suicide here, I could just twitch my hand and I’d be slammed into a barnacled tree trunk at Mach 1.
Then out into a finger of water that ran between piers. The piers were actually little piers attached to big piers, so out into a bigger finger of water that ran between the big piers, then into the channel, and from there to a tentacle of the Harbor that fed the channel.
At some point I was entitled to say that I had entered Boston Harbor, the toilet of the Northeast. By shoving the motor over to one side I could spin the Zode in tight rings and look up into the many shit-greased sphincters of the Fair Lady on the Hill, Hub of the Universe, Cradle of Crap, my hometown. Boston Harbor is my baby. There are biologists who know more about its fish and geographers who have statistics on its shipping, but I know more about its dark, carcinogenic side than anyone. In four years of work, I’ve idled my Zodiac down every one of its thousands of inlets, looked at every inch of its fractal coastline and found every single goddamn pipe that empties into it. Some of the pipes are big enough to park a car in and some are the size of your finger, but all of them have told their secrets to my gas chromatograph. And often it’s the littlest pipes that cause the most damage. When I see a big huge pipe coming right out of a factory, I’m betting that the pumpers have at least read the EPA regs. But when I find a tiny one, hidden below the waterline, sprouting from a mile-wide industrial carnival, I put on gloves before taking my sample. And sometimes the gloves melt.
In a waterproof chest I keep a number of big yellow stickers: NOTICE. THIS OUTFALL IS BEING MONITORED ON A REGULAR BASIS BY GEE INTERNATIONAL. IF IN VIOLATION OF EPA REGULATIONS, IT MAY BE PLUGGED AT ANY TIME. FOR INFORMATION CALL: (then, scribbled into a blank space, and always the same), SANGAMON TAYLOR (and our phone number).
Even I can’t believe how many violators I catch with these stickers. Whenever I find a pipe that’s deliberately unmarked, whose owners don’t want to be found, I slap one of these stickers up nearby. Within two weeks the phone rings.
“GEE,” I say.
“Sangamon Taylor there?”
“He’s in the john right now, can I have him call you back?”
“Uh, okay, yeah, I guess so.”
“What did you want to talk to him about?”
“I’m calling about your sticker.”
“Which one?”
“The one on the Island End River, about halfway up?”
“Okay.” And I dutifully take their number, hang up, and dial right back.
Ring. Ring. Click. “Hello, Chelsea Electroplating, may I help your
Case closed.
A few years of that and I owned this Harbor. The EPA and the DEQE called me irresponsible on odd-numbered days and phoned me for vital information on even-numbered ones. Every once in a while some agency or politician would announce a million-dollar study to track down all the crap going into the Harbor and I’d mail in a copy of my report. Every year The Weekly published my list of the ten worst polluters:
(1) Bostonians (feces)
(2–3) Basco and Fotex, always fighting it out for number two, (you name it)
(4–7) Whopping defense contractors (various solvents)
(8–10) Small but nasty heavy-metal dumpers like Derinsov Tanning and various electroplaters.
The Boston sewage treatment system is pure Dark Ages. Most of the items flushed down metropolitan toilets are quickly shot into the Harbor, dead raw. If you go for a jog on Wollaston Beach, south of town, when the currents are flavorful, you will find it glistening with human turds. But usually they sink to the bottom and merge.
Today I was out on the Zodiac for two reasons. One: to get away from the city and my job, just to sit out on the water. Two: Project Lobster. Number one doesn’t have to be explained to anyone. Number two has been my work for the last six months or so.
Usually I do my sampling straight out of pipes. But no one’s ever satisfied. I tell them what’s going in and they say, okay, where does it end up? Because currents and tides can scatter it, while living things can concentrate it.
Ideally I’d like to take a chart of the Harbor and draw a grid over it, with points spaced about a hundred yards apart, then get a sample of what’s on the sea floor at each one of those points. Analysis of each sample would show how much bad shit there was, then I’d know how things were distributed.
In practice I can’t do that. We just don’t have the resources to get sampling equipment down to the floor of the Harbor and back up again, over and over.
But there’s a way around any problem. Lobstermen work the Harbor. Their whole business is putting sampling devices—lobster traps—on the floor of the sea and then hauling them back up again carrying samples—lobsters. I’ve got a deal with a few different boats. They give me the least desirable parts of their catch, and I record where they came from. Lobsters are somewhat mobile, more so than oysters but less than fish. They pretty much stay in one zone of the Harbor. And while they’re there, they do a very convenient thing for me called bioconcentration. They eat food and shit it out the other end, but part of it stays with them, usually the worst part. A trace amount of, say, PCBs in their environment will show up as a much higher concentration in their livers. So when I get a lobster and figure out what toxins it’s carrying, I have a pretty good id
ea of what’s on the floor of the Harbor in its neighborhood.
Once I get my data into the computer, I can persuade it to draw contour maps showing the dispersion pattern of each type of toxin. For example, if I’m twisting Basco’s dick at the moment, I’ll probably look at PCBs. So the computer draws all the land areas and blacks them out. Then it begins to shade in the water areas, starting out in the Atlantic, which is drawn in a beautiful electric blue. You don’t have to look at the legend to know that this water is pure. As we approach Boston, the colors get warmer, and warmer. Most of the harbor is yellow. In places we see rings of orange, deepening toward the center until they form angry red boils clustered against the shore. Next to each boil I write a caption: “Basco Primary Outfall.” “Basco Temporary Storage Facility.” “Basco-owned Parcel (under EPA Investigation).” “Parcel Owned by Basco Subsidiary (under EPA Investigation).” Translate this into a 35-mm slide, take it to a public hearing, draw the curtains and splash it up on a twenty-foot screen—voilà, an instant lynch mob. Then the lights come up and a brand-new Basco flack comes out, fresh from B.U. or Northeastern, and begins talking about eyedroppers in railway tank cars. Then his company gets lacerated by the media.
This is the kind of thing I think about when buzzing around, looking for Gallagher the lobsterman.
Sometimes I had this daydream where a big-time coke runner from Miami got environmentally conscious and donated one of his Cigarette boats. It wasn’t going to happen—not even coke dealers were that rich. But I thought about it, read the boating magazines, dreamed up ways to use one. And right now on the channel between Charlestown and Eastie, two miles north, I could see a thirty-one foot Cigarette just sitting there on the water. It’s kind of like what my Zodiac would look like if it had been built by defense contractors: way too big, way too fast, a hundred times too expensive. The larger models have a cabin in front, but this didn’t even have that comfort. It was open-cockpit, made for nothing in the world but dangerous speed. I’d seen it yesterday, too, sitting there doing nothing. I wondered if it would be terribly self-important if I attributed its presence to mine. The worst Fotex plant was up that way, and maybe they were anticipating a sneak attack.
Implausible. If their security was that good, they’d know that our assault ketch, the Blowfish, was off the coast of New Jersey, homing in on poor unsuspecting Blue Kills. Without it we didn’t have enough Zodiacs, or divers, to stage a pipe-plugging raid on Fotex. So maybe this was some rich person working on a suntan. But if he owned a boat that could do seventy miles an hour, why didn’t he take it off that syphilitic channel? He was on the Mystic, for God’s sake.
I caught up with the Scoundrel off the coast of Eastie, not far from the artificial plateau that made up the airport. These guys were the first to join Project Lobster, and hence my favorites. Initially none of the lobstermen trusted me, afraid that I’d ruin their business with my statements of doom. But when the Harbor got really bad, and people started talking about banning all fish from the area, they started to see I was on their side. A clean Harbor was in their own best interests.
Gallagher should have been extra tough, because I had a tendency to rag on the subject of Spectacle Island. This was not a true island but a mound of garbage dumped in the Harbor by an ancestor of his, a tugboat operator who’d been lucky enough to get the city’s garbage-hauling concession in the 1890s. But, as Rory explained many times and loudly, those were the Charlestown Gallaghers, the rich, arrogant, semi-Anglicized branch. Sometime back in the Twenties, some Gallagher’s nose had gotten splintered in a wedding brawl or something, thus creating the rift between that branch and Rory’s—the Southie Gallaghers, the humble farmers of the sea.
“Attention all crew, we have a long-haired invironmintl at ten o’clock, prepare to be boarded,” Rory called, his Southie accent thick as mustard gas. All these guys talked that way. Their “ar” sounds could shatter reinforced concrete. I’d been to a couple of games with them; we’d sit up there in the bleachers and inhale watery beer and throw cigars to the late, lamented Dave Henderson. They couldn’t not be loud and boisterous, so they gave me shit about my hair, which didn’t even come down to my collar. I could take a few minutes of this, but then I needed to go to a nice sterile shopping mall and decompress.
“Aaaay, we got some beauties for you today, Cap’n Taylor, some real skinny oily ones.”
“Going to the game tonight, Rory?”
“A bunch of us are, yeah. Why, you wanna go?”
“Can’t. Going to Jersey tomorrow.”
“Jersey! Sheesh!” All the buys on the boat went “sheesh!” They couldn’t believe anyone would be stupid enough to go to that place.
They tossed me a couple of half-dead lobsters and showed me where they’d trapped them on the chart. I jotted the locations down and put the bugs on ice. Later, when I got back, I’d have to dismantle them and run the analysis.
We traded speculation on what Sam Horn might do against the Yanks. These guys were Negro-haters all, and their heros were gigantic black men with clubs, a contradiction I wasn’t brave enough to point out.
I went to handle the most depressing part of my job. Poor people get tired of welfare cheese after a while and start looking for other sources of protein. For example, fish. But poor people can’t charter a boat to go out and catch swordfish, so they fish off docks. That means they’re looking for bottom fish. Anyone who knows about Boston Harbor gets queasy just at the mention of bottom fish, but these people were worried about kwashiorkor, not cancer. Three-quarters of them were Southeast Asian.
So a month ago I’d typed up a highly alarming paragraph about what these particular bottom fish would do to your health, especially to the health of unborn children. Tried to make it simple: no chemical terms, no words like “carcinogenicity.” Took it to the Pearl, which is my hangout, and persuaded Hoa to translate it to Vietnamese for me. Took it to an interpreter at City Hospital and got her to translate it into Cambodian. Had a friend do it in Spanish. Put them all together on a sign, sort of a toxic Rosetta Stone, made numerous copies and then made a few midnight trips to the piers where they like to do this fishing. We put the signs up in prominent places, bolted them down with lag screws, epoxied those screws into place and then chopped the heads off.
And when I came around the curve of the North End, bypassing a few hundred stalled cars on Commercial Street, riding the throttle high because I had miles to go before I’d sleep, I saw the same old pier, all hairy with fishing poles. It looked like one of those shadows you see under a microscope, with cilia sticking out all over to gather in food, healthy or otherwise.
Somehow I didn’t figure these guys were sportsmen. They weren’t of the catch-and-release school, like those geezers on TV. They were survivalists in a toxic wilderness.
The old etiquette dies hard. I grew up in a family that liked to fish, and I couldn’t bring myself to break up the party. I backed off on the throttle when I was far away, and coasted to a safe distance where I wouldn’t scare off any of those precious shit-eaters under the pier. Circled it slowly, looking at the fishermen, and they looked back at me. The name of my organization was writ large in orange tape on the side of the Zodiac. I wondered if they were reading it, and making the connection with those threatening signs just above their heads.
They were Vietnamese and black, with a few Hispanics. The blacks I wasn’t as worried about. Not because they were black but because they seemed to fish for recreation. They’d been fishing here forever. You saw old black guys everywhere in Boston where there was water, sitting there in their old fedoras, staring at the water, waiting. Never saw them catch anything. But the Vietnamese went at it with a passion born of long-term protein deficiency.
There was kind of a ripple of interest up there on a corner of the pier and the crowd parted, leaving one Vietnamese in the middle. They were getting their lines and poles out of his way so he could reel one in. A flopping, good-sized flounder emerged, seeming to levitate because you
couldn’t see the line. Headed for a family wok in Boston. It wouldn’t yield much meat, but the concentration of PCBs and heavy metals in that flesh would be thousands of times what it was in the water around us.
I glumly watched it ascend, thinking, these guys must use heavy-duty lines, because they had to support the whole weight of the fish. You didn’t have a chance to net it in the water. The lucky angler made a grab for his prize and our eyes snagged each other for a second. I’d seen this guy before; he was a busboy at the Pearl.
What the fuck. Cranked up the Zode, twisted it, blew a crater in the Harbor and wheeled it around. Flounder be damned. When it came to this issue, GEE was fucked both ways. Try to stop them from poisoning themselves, and you look like you’re interfering with a band of spunky immigrants. But now I had a face, at least. There wasn’t any reason to hound this particular busboy, but I had good relations with Hoa and maybe I could get in touch with these people through him. Maybe GEE could run a free fishing charter out into the Atlantic, take these people out where they could catch some real fish. But pause to consider what the liability insurance would cost on that sucker.
Then, out of nowhere, it hit me: what I needed was some bitterly cold beer and really loud, brain-crushing rock and roll. Maybe some nitrous to go with that. I lit a cigar, cranked the Mercury up into one loud, long power chord, and headed for our naval base.
5
Bartholomew was lurking in his van in front of GEE when I got back. He started leaning on the horn as soon as he spotted me climbing up out of the T. All around the square, defense contractors flocked to their metallized windows to see if their BMWs were being violated, then drifted back, unable to localize the sound. I sauntered on purpose, pretended to ignore him, climbed the stairs to get my bike. I should have known that if I wanted recreation, my roommate would be thinking along the same lines. That is why, despite many kinds of incompatibility, we lived together: our minds ran in parallel ruts.
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