by Richard Ford
Wintry effluvium has turned my vehicle into an icebox, and I’ve cranked the heat up on my feet, my belly already sensing a mixed signal from my hot dog. The three boats parable is, in fact, a useful moral directive, and though Wade would sneer at me, in my own view I’ve heeded it by giving a wide berth to the Grove and Vicki/Ricki, or whatever her name is. Of course, my more natural habit would be to consider most all things as mutable, and to resist obstinance in human affairs, an attitude which has helped me to think more positively about Sally’s return and not to be flattened like roadkill by her abandoning me (I think of myself as a variablist). The realty profession itself thrives on the perpetual expectation of changes for the better, and is permanently resistant to the concept of either the rock or the hard place. Ann, however, once pointed out to me that a variablist can be a frog who sits in a pan of water, looking all around and feeling pretty good about things, while the heat’s gradually turned up, until cozy, happy pond life becomes frog soup.
In the three boats story, a man is floating alone in an ocean without a life jacket when a boat passes by. “Get in. I’ll save you,” the boatman says. “Oh, no, it’s fine,” the floating man answers, “I’m putting my faith in the Lord.” In time, two more boats come along, and to each rescuer the man—usually me, in Wade’s telling—says, “No, no, I’m putting my faith in the Lord.” Eventually, and it isn’t very long in coming, the man drowns. Yet when he stands up to meet his Maker at the fated spot where some rejoice but many more cower, his Maker looks sternly down and says, “You’re a fool. You’re assigned to hell forever. Go there now.” To which the drowned man says, “But your honor, I put my faith in you. You promised to save me.” “Save you!?” fearsome God shouts from misty marmoreal heights (and this is the moment the old liver-lipped procurer of his own daughter likes most, when his scaly eyelids blink down hard and his tongue darts like a grinning Beelzebub). “Save you? Save you?” God thunders. “I sent you three boats!” And off goes Frank forever.
The last time Wade told this story—in reference to who the American people should’ve chosen but probably didn’t in this doomed election now awaiting God’s wrath—God supposedly said, “Three fucking boats! I already sent you three fucking boats, you morons. Now go to hell.” God, Wade believes, sees most things as they are and has no trouble telling it.
But the point’s plain. Drowning men save themselves, no matter how it looks from the shore and even though it’s not always easy to assess your own situation. Vicki/Ricki’s my last boat, Wade believes. Though in my view (and what could she look like after sixteen years), she’s only a ghost ship out of the mists. To drive to the Grove and reconnect with that old life would be treacherous even for a variablist—as asinine as Sally heading off to Mull or Ann wanting to forge a new union with me. In the modern idiom, that boat won’t float. And I’m resolved to stay here even in the deep water, waiting for the next one, even if it’s the boat to you-know-where.
The first glass place I see—Glass, Glass, & More Glass—is closed, closed, & more closed. The second, Want a Pane in the Glass? in the 35 U-Need-It Strip Mall, has its metal grate chained to the sidewalk and everything dark within. The third, in Manasquan—forth-rightly called Glass?—appears open, though when I walk inside the dingy, echoing, oily-lit front showroom with its big sheets of plate glass leaned against the walls, there’s not a soul in evidence. I step through a door to a long, cold, shadowy room with empty wide-topped tables where glass could be cut. But no one’s around—no sounds of skilled labor in progress, or the after-work noises of back-room pre-holiday whiskey cheer. Which suddenly turns me spooky, as if a storage bin of cooling corpses awaits beyond the next door, a pre-holiday revenge-hit by elements from north of here.
“Hello,” I timidly call out—but only once—then, quick as a flash, beat it back to my freezing car.
It has somehow become four o’clock. Daylight’s sunk out of the invisible east. Sunset’s at a daunting 4:36. Brash wind and slashing rain sheets have begun whacking my windshield and beading moisture on the backseat. Headlights are now in use. It’s drive-time, the race home, the time no one but the doomed want to be on our nation’s roadways—including me, with nobody waiting at the doorway, no plans to make the hours resemble the true joy of living.
A drink’s what I require. I usually hold the line till six, a discipline well known to weary corporate accountants, single-handed sailors and hard-luck novelists in need of cheering. But six is a state of mind, and my state of mind says it’s six, which even out front of the spooky Glass? confers a jollying self-confirming certainty that positive elections can still be mine—not just refusals to drive Wade to the Grove or to romance the unspecified Ricki. I can have a drink. Some good things, warm sensations, await me.
I’m once again only a stone’s short throw from the old Manasquan Bar, below the river bridge, where I took the 34 cut-off earlier. There I can certainly have a drink (and a piss) in familiar, congenial surroundings. Save an Hour, Save an Evening—the late-occurring motto for the day.
The Manasquan, which I head straight toward, would ordinarily—as I said before—be off-limits to me due to its anchorage in the past and prone-ness to fumy nostalgias. In the middle eighties, it had its scheduled and amiable purpose. After a night’s chartered fishing excursion on the Mantoloking Belle, the Manasquan was the Divorced Men’s special venue for demonstrating residual rudimentary social, communicative and empathy skills (we actually weren’t very good at any of these things and not good at fishing, either), and we all fled to it the instant we stepped off our boat—our legs rubbery, arms weak from manning our rods, thirsts worked up. The charter captain’s mustachioed brother-in-law owned the place—an extended family of crafty Greeks. And it sat where it sat—hard by the dock—to make sure the Mouzakis family got all our money before sending us home happier but wiser. Which, as if by magic, is what happened—until it didn’t, at which point and by no agreed-upon signal, we all quit going and consigned it to the past and oblivion, where we wished our old marriages would go.
Though I sense I have nothing to fear now from the Manasquan, for reason of its prosaic, standard-dockside, snug-away character—the red BAR sign on its shingled roof, muted rose-blue accent lights, tar-ry nautical smells, plenty of cork buoys and shellacked swordfish husks on the walls alongside decades of dusty fishermen photos. It will be as it was years back: detoxified and inoculated by inauthenticity, with no negative juju powers to give me the creeps about not throwing my life over to become a second mate on a halibut hauler off the Grand Banks, and instead being a realtor—or a State Farm agent in Hightstown, or a garden supply owner-operator in Haddam, or a podiatrist in Rocky Hill—all those things we were back in ’83. Of course, I anticipated the same at the Johnny Appleseed last night, with sorry results.
I take the Manasquan jug-handle and loop down around to the small embarcadero fronting the River Marina, where banners are still up from the annual striper derby in September, an antique fair and last summer’s Big Sea Day on the beach. All is familiar—the Mouzakis Paramount Show Boat Dock and the lowly Manasquan itself, red BAR warmly glowing through the early-evening rain.
Although names have changed. The Paramount Dock is now Uncle Ben’s Excursions. The old Belle, with a fresh pink paint job, is dimly visible at the dock’s end, bearing the name Pink Lady. The shingled, barn-roofed Manasquan, once in neon above the portholed entry, has become Old Squatters, with a plain black-letter sign hung to the door itself.
And by a good stroke, across the puddled lot from the dock and bar, there’s now, outside the old Quonset shed where nautical gear was once stored for the charter business, a shingle that says BOAT, CARS, TRAILER REPAIRS. NO JOB TOO ABSURD. Lights are on in the garage and the tiny office. I swing around, stop in front and walk up to ask about a back-window repair.
Inside, a small black-haired man in need of a shave is seated behind the counter, close to a gas space heater, listening to a Greek radio station playing twiny bouzou
ki music while he eats an enormous sandwich. A long-legged, peroxided, pimpled kid with tattoos on his arms, possibly the son, sits in a tipped-back dinette chair across the tiny overheated office, bent over a foxed copy of The Great G atsby—the old green-gray-and-white Scribner Library edition I read in “American Existentialism and Beyond” in Ann Arbor in 1964. For decades, I reread it every year, exactly the way we’re all supposed to, then got sick of its lapidary certainties disguised as spoiled innocence—something I don’t believe in—and gave my last copy to the Toms River Shriners’ Xmas Benefit. Garage mechanics, of course, play a pivotal role in Fitzgerald’s denouement, transacted scarcely a hundred miles from here as the gull flies. It is this boy, I’m certain, who’s authored the sign outside, and he I address about my window.
His eyes raise above his book top and he smiles a perfectly receptive smile, though the older attendant never looks at me. He may only wait on other Greeks.
“Okay,” the boy says before I can explain the whole situation and how little I’ll be satisfied with. “I’ll do it. Duct tape okay?” He looks back with interest to his page. He’s near the end, where Meyer Wolfsheim says, “When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way. I keep out.” Sound advice.
“Great,” I say. “I’ll head over to the Manasquan and try the cocktails.” I offer a nod of trust that promises a big tip.
“Leave me them keys.” He’s wearing a blue mechanic’s shirt with a white patch that says Chris in red cursives. Likely he’s a Monmouth College student on Thanksgiving break, the first of his immigrant family to blub, blub, blub. I’m tempted to poll his views about Jay Gatz. Victim? Ill-starred innocent? Gray-tinged antihero? Or all three at once, vividly registering Fitzgerald’s glum assessment of our century’s plight—now blessedly at an end. The “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” imagery is at odds with the three boats imagery of the old Nick Carraway doppelganger, Wade. It’s possible of course that as a modern student, Chris doesn’t subscribe to the author concept per se. I, however, still do.
Keys handed off, I head across the drizzly gravel lot to the Old Squatters né Manasquan, heartened that the time-honored shade-tree way of doing business “While-U-Wait” is still a tradition in this part of our state—among immigrants anyway—and hasn’t caved in to the franchise volume-purchasing-power mentality that only knows “that’s on back order” or “the manufacturer stopped making those”—the millennial free-enterprise canon in which the customer’s a bit-part player to the larger drama of gross accumulation (what the Republicans want for us, though the liars say they don’t).
Dense, good bar smell meets me when I step inside, surprising for being the exact aroma I remember—stale beer, cigarette smoke, boat tar, urinal soap, popcorn, wax for the leather banquettes, and floor-sweep granules—a positive, good-prospects smell, though probably best appreciated by men my age.
The dark-cornered, barny old room looks the same as when Ernie McAuliffe pounded his fists on the table and racketed on about Ruskies—the long-raftered ceiling, the long bar down the right side, back-lit with fuzzed red and blue low-lights and ranked rows of every kind of cheap hooch you’d dream of, all reflected in a smoky mirror on which the management has taped a smiling cartoon turkey with a cartoon Pilgrim pointing a musket at it. Two patrons sit at a table at the booth-lined rear wall. There’s a tiny square linoleum dance floor, where no one ever danced in my day, and hung above it a mirror-faceted disco ball useful when things are jumping, which I don’t remember ever being the case. Once the Manasquan served a decent broasted-chicken basket and a popcorn-shrimp platter. But no one’s eating, and no food smell’s in the atmosphere. The swinging chrome doors to the kitchen are barred and padlocked.
I am, though, happy to arrive, and to take a stool at the near end of the bar, with a view toward the other patrons—two women drinking and talking to the bartender.
As I left Asbury Park, with Wade careering off toward what destiny I don’t know, and an empty nest awaiting me and the weather swarming into my car, I tried—just as I did the day I returned from Mayo last August, radiating anti-cancer contamination like Morse code—to imagine what a really good day might be. And in each instance I thought of the same thing (this strategy, as childlike as it seems, ought not be scoffed at).
Two years ago, Sally and I set off on one of our cut-rate one-day flying adventures—this time to Moline—with the intention of taking an historic boat trip down the Mississippi, visiting some interesting Algonquian earthworks, seeing a Civil War ironclad that had been hauled out of the muck and given its own museum, and maybe stopping off at the Golden Nugget casino, which the same Algonquians had built to recoup their dignity. We planned to finish the day with an early dinner in the rotating tenth-floor River Room of the Holiday Inn-Moline, then get back on the plane in time to be home by 3 a.m.
But when we got to the departure dock of the romantic old paddle-wheeler, the S.S. Chief Illini, a storm began dumping every manner of precip on us—snow, rain, sleet, hail, arriving by turns with a coarse wind at their backs. We’d bought our tickets off the Internet ahead of time, but neither Sally nor I wanted any part of a river cruise, wanted only to head back up the old cobbled streets of the historic district in search of a nice place to have lunch and to hatch a new plan for the hours that remained—possibly a leisurely trip through the John Deere Museum, since we had time to kill. I went aboard and told the boat captain, who was also the concessionaire and proprietor of the cruise business and owner of the Chief Illini, that we were sacrificing our tickets due to weather skittishness but wanted him to know (since he seemed personable and accommodating) that we’d be back another time and buy more tickets. To which the captain, a big happy-faced galoot dressed in his river pilot’s blue serge uniform with gold epaulettes and a captain’s cap, said, “Look here, you folks, we don’t want anybody not to have a good time in Moline. I know this weather’s the pits and all. I’ll just return your money, and don’t you sweat it. We’re not in the business here in River City to take anybody’s dough without rendering a first-class service. In fact, since you’ve come all this way”—he didn’t know we’d flown from Newark but recognized we probably weren’t locals—“maybe you’ll be my guest at the Miss Moline diner my sister runs, where she makes authentic Belgian waffles with farm-fresh eggs and homemade sticky buns. How ’bout I just give her a call and say you’re on your way up there? And here’re some tickets to the John Deere Museum, the best one you’ll find from here to South Dakota.”
We didn’t end up eating at the Miss Moline. But we did take in the museum, which was well-curated, with interesting displays about glaciation, wind erosion and soil content that explained why in that part of America you could grow anything you wanted pretty much anytime—forget about the growing season.
When I think about it now, here in the Manasquan—or the Old Squatters—with my window being fixed while I take my ease in these familiar detoxified surrounds, I can almost believe I made it up, so perfect a day did it produce for Sally and me, and so enduring has it been as illustration of how things can work out better than you thought—like now—even when all points of the spiritual weather vane forecast dark skies.
Okay, I could aks you again, but it ain’t good to wake up de dead.” A small mouse-faced woman with a silver flat-top and two good-sized ears full of tiny regimented gold loops stacked lobe to helix, faces me across the empty bar surface. A look of wry, not hostile, amusement sits on her lips, though her lips also have a permanent wrinkle to their contours, as if harsh words had once passed through but things had gotten better now.
I don’t know what she’s been saying, but assume it’s to do with my drink preference. I’ve decided on the time-honored highball, the all-around drinker’s drink, to commemorate the old divorced men, many of whom have now died. It’s perfect for me in my state. “I’d like a tall bourbon and soda on ice, please.”
“Dat ain’t what I sed. But whatever.”
I smile pointlessly. “Sorry.”
“I aksed wuz you sure you wuz meetin’ your friends in de right place here.” The bartender casts a look around down the bar toward her customers, two large older women elbowed in over birdbath-size cocktails, covertly eyeing me but clearly amused.
“I think so.” Her accent is pure swamp-water coon-ass, straight from St. Boudreau Parish, far beyond the Atchafalaya. She’s trying to be nice, making me know as gently as possible that the atmospheric old Manasquan has become a watering hole for late-middle-passage dykes and possibly I might be happier elsewhere, but I don’t have to leave if I don’t want to.
Except I couldn’t be happier than to be here amidst these fellow refugees. The nautical motif’s intact. The framed greasy-glass heroic fish photos still cover the walls with coded significance. The light’s murky, the smells are congenial, the world’s held at bay, as in the storied Manasquan days. Probably the drinks are just as good. I couldn’t care less whose orientation’s bending its big elbow beside mine. In fact, I feel a strong Darwinian rightness about what was once a hard-nuts old men’s hidey-hole transitioning into a safe house for tolerant, wry, full-figured, thick-armed goddesses in deep mufti (one’s wearing a Yankees cap, another a pair of bulgy housepainter’s dungarees over a Vassar sweatshirt). My own daughter used to be one of their number, I could tell them—but possibly won’t.
“I used to come in here when Evangelis owned it,” I say gratefully, referring to old Ben Mouzakis’s sister’s husband.
“Fo’ my time, dahlin’,” the bartender croons, organizing my highball. I see she has a vivid green tattoo on her skinny neck, inches below her ear. Gothic letters spell out TERMITE, which I guess could be her name, though I’m not about to call her that.
“How’s ole Ben doing?”