Hound of the Sea

by Garrett McNamara

  I was five years old. Until my mom left me with Jose Pepe and his family, my parenting, such as it was, consisted of interacting with a revolving cast of mostly strung-out grown-ups coming and going and coming and going. No one paid much attention to me. No one told me what to do or what not to do. No one had ever said I should use a fork, or that it was impolite to play with your ding dong in public. I never heard, “Be careful, you’ll burn yourself,” or “fall and hurt yourself,” or “lose an eye.” Everything I knew I had learned on my own. Still, there always seemed to be arms to hold me or a lap to sit on, and if people were eating they made sure I ate, too.

  My mom is a great-grandniece of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and has a powerful and eccentric belief in God. Regarding Liam and me, she dumped us in God’s hands, more or less. When I was older and had become a father myself and asked about my running-wild childhood, she said she wanted my brother and me to figure things out for ourselves.

  Her time at Stockbridge—she was a student there before she worked there—convinced her that nothing good came of rules, regulations, guidance, and instruction. All that created automatons and yes-men who had no ability to think for themselves, no deep sense of right or wrong, and whose instincts were programmed out of them.

  She felt God was alive in us and believed He would watch over us and protect us, allowing us just enough terrible experiences to build our character and teach us about the reality of life on earth.

  I lived with Jose Pepe and his family for a few weeks. It goes without saying that his household was a lot more structured than what I was used to. Sit-down meals, nightly baths, regular bedtimes. I loved it. Every day Jose Pepe hoisted me up on the back of the same drowsy yellow horse. I forgot all about the roosterfish, until one day we were headed toward the barn after our daily ride and I saw the dusty red-and-white VW van trundling up the driveway.

  “If it isn’t Gitana,” he said. That was Jose Pepe’s name for my mother. Her real name was Mary but she went by Debbie, and now Jose Pepe christened her Gitana, “gypsy” in Spanish. There was never any doubt in my mind that my mom would come back for me, but Jose sounded surprised. We got off our horses and watched as Luis parked the van and my mom stepped down from the passenger side. They were all alone.

  Jose Pepe invited them in for lunch. While I sat eating my stewed chicken and tortillas I listened to my mom spin one of her stories. It’s one of her gifts, making everything that happens to her sound both incredible and completely normal.

  After they’d left me at Jose Pepe’s ranch they picked up some hitchhikers, hippies from Guatemala City who’d been in the medical supply business but had dropped out to join a traveling circus. Mad Bob drove them all the way to the circus, and as usually happened, once the producer of the circus met my mom, he invited them all to dinner, and afterward she, Luis, Mad Bob, and his two daughters wound up staying there, sleeping under the big top with the performers. The tent had been hand-sewn out of burlap sugar sacks.

  The circus charged ten cents a ticket, and they held performances every night until they made enough money to move on. The circus producer was frantic because he’d just found out there was another circus on its way to the same village. They charged twenty-five cents a ticket, but they also had a lion. The closest he came to a lion was a pair of depressed llamas who could spit on command.

  Mad Bob, inspired, rigged up a loudspeaker on top of the van and spent the rest of the day driving around the village announcing the wonders of the smaller, poorer, lion-less circus. At the end of the day they offered him a job as the strongman, so he and his daughters decided to stay.

  There were more stories. With my mom there are always more stories. Something about meeting someone else and going somewhere else and spending a few days discovering the wonders of Guatemalan cotton yarn dyeing and weaving. But Jose Pepe seemed to have lost interest. He was looking at me. I remember him putting his hand on the top of my head as I ate.

  He waited until my mom stopped talking, then asked her whether he and his family might adopt me.

  GITANA

  I CAN HOLD MY breath for four and a half minutes. Still, I’ve wiped out and thrashed around in the wash cycle for so long my peripheral vision disappears and all I see before my eyes are black stars. Don’t know which way is up. Don’t even know where I am. Then the ocean gods pop me up like a cork, gifting me with a second to open my mouth and grab a breath before the next sixty-foot wave brings the next pounding. I’ve been rescued by friends in the lineup and by partners on jet-skis, blue-lipped and gasping and not sure I could say my last name. All of which is to say I’ve suffered a lot of brain hypoxia—oxygen deprivation—over the years. As a result my memory feels as if it’s been rag-dolled through time, leaving me unsure of the who what when where why and how of a lot of incidents. I can reliably recall specific events and especially the names of a lot of the guys in the lineup on a certain day when I was killing it, or nearly being killed, but timelines and dates are, much of the time, a messed-up jumble.

  The waters of my early grade-school memories are further muddied by my parents’ freewheeling habit of swapping sons on a whim. It feels like Liam and I were always coming and going, two ships passing in the night. My dad stayed in his little house built into the hill near the commune in Cazadero, then moved back to Berkeley. My mom was in full Gitana mode, always on the move, always headed somewhere, inevitably waylaid by some hitchhiker or stoned visionary who appeared out of the jungle with pertinent advice or a life-changing premonition. Then she would switch course in midstream, head out in the opposite direction. Most of the time my dad never knew where she was, and neither did she.

  MY MOM declined Jose Pepe’s offer to adopt me. Together with Luis we drove north, back through northern Guatemala and the little villages where we’d camped along the coast of southern Mexico, turning inland to stop in Mexico City and visit Luis’s family. I missed Mad Bob’s low-key energy and even his daughters, who used to complain about my farting up the back of the van. Turns out Luis was the jealous type, and all the hippies and locals and shopkeepers and dope peddlers my mom charmed along the way were starting to get under his skin. He didn’t say anything—or anything in my presence, anyway—until after we stopped in Mexico City and he accused her of flirting with his father. Then all his passionate talk and high spirits went south, and he settled into a sour mood for the rest of the drive north.

  Luis was no stranger to real-deal communal living. Before he wandered into our lives he’d lived in Cuernavaca, at a commune comprising Mexican doctors and lawyers and other professional people. This convinced my mom he would fit right in to life in our commune in Sonoma County, but the vibe was all wrong. From the moment we arrived it was clear he didn’t want to be there with the people she’d known before, especially my dad.

  One of my mom’s favorite hippie friends, Lillian, had been through a few things in our absence, had gone off to India where she’d been arrested for possession of hash, and she wound up giving birth to a baby in jail. Now she and the baby lived in a geodesic dome up in the mountains somewhere. She was anything but scared straight by this experience, and upon our return to the commune she gave my mom a sheet of mint windowpane acid, a welcome-home present. My mom threw a party for the assembled commune people and the local farmers and dissolved some of the acid in the punch. They sat in lawn chairs all night staring at the eastern horizon waiting for the sun to come up, and when it did, one farmer’s wife, perched in the lap of her husband, wept and said she’d never seen a sunrise like that before in her life.

  Yep, we were home.

  It was all too much for Luis. Not long afterward my mom scooped up Liam and the three of them took off.

  WEEKS OR months later my dad put me on an airplane in Oakland, headed to Belize. Then it was called British Honduras. I recall several stops, takeoffs, and landings, and largely empty planes. I was shown the cockpit. The stewardesses fed me grapes. On my lap I carried my mom’s autoharp. S
he’d forgotten it at the commune during her hasty departure and now missed it.

  Mom and Luis’s new scheme involved making marijuana bowls by harvesting scrap hardwood and carving them to somehow de-seed your pot. I never understood how it worked, and I’m not sure they did either, because once they’d purchased a few acres of property bordering a mosquito-infested lagoon in the jungle, they bought a cow they named Bossy and a horse they named Bitch and a bunch of chickens. My favorite chicken was named Hole-head, so called because she had a hole in her head from where the other chickens had pecked her skull clear to her little chicken brain. You could see the shiny insides in the right light.

  After a while Mom and Luis set about building us a Swiss Family Robinson−style tree house in a stand of balata trees. The construction was all-consuming and they pretty much forgot all about the wood and the bowls and proceeded to get into terrible fights that startled the wildlife, and also our gentle Mennonite neighbors.

  The Mennonites had emigrated from Pennsylvania. On their small farms they raised dairy cows, grew vegetables, and kept honeybees. They didn’t believe in electricity—convenient, because there was none to be had—and operated a small sawmill with a team of patient-looking draft horses. I played with the little Mennonite children. The boys wore light blue cotton shirts, dark pants, and suspenders, and the little girls wore long cotton dresses. Somehow I knew to put on some clothes when I would meet them for games of hide-and-seek and tag in the sugarcane fields.

  My toys were a machete for hacking through the cane fields, and the iguanas I’d capture and “walk” around the property with strings around their necks. I pretended they were my pet dogs and gave them names like Spot and Rover.

  Our kitchen sat in a clearing not far from the ladder that led up to the living quarters. It had a wood-burning stove, and a thatched roof with a hole in the middle so the smoke from the stove could escape. A neighbor taught my mom how to make bread. Most days she made red beans and rice and split a coconut for dessert. Every morning I’d climb to the top of a coconut tree, cut some off, and throw them down for her.

  I loved climbing trees, but my all-time favorite pastime was riding them. Long before I’d heard of riding waves I rode trees. All I needed was one of the more daring Mennonite boys to help out. I’d climb to the top of one of the young jungle trees near a clearing. Bullet trees with their lush leaves were the best and provided the softest landing. I’d climb to the topmost branch, give the word, and my playmate would chop down the tree with my machete. I’d ride it all the way to the ground.

  JUNGLE LIVING did nothing to quiet Luis’s inner psycho demon. He didn’t like how my mom cooked the red beans and rice and made the bread and chopped up the coconuts. To get to the only store in the district my mom had to take a rowboat. He didn’t like how she chatted with anyone she met on the lagoon, rowing to the store. A favorite form of abuse was kicking her in the head while wearing the muddy combat boots he wore to work in the cane fields. He wouldn’t stop until she was a bloody mess.

  The one great advantage to being completely unsupervised was that when the shouting started I could flee, scampering down the ladder or bolting out of the kitchen. I was there for all of the escalating abuse, and yet I wasn’t. I learned the value of separating myself from a bad situation, or finding a way to amuse myself while the domestic ground shook and buckled beneath my feet. I learned to survive. I’m sure I’ve also just blocked a lot of it out, and there’s something to be said for that as well.

  Mom loved Luis—she would leave him and go back to him several times over the coming years—but she was not about to sit around and get whupped without putting up a fight. She was Gitana; she could always pack up and leave. She sold Bossy the cow and Bitch the horse to our Mennonite neighbors, and one day while Luis was out somewhere we fled in our rowboat, across the lagoon.

  I sat on the wooden bench as my mom rowed, a bundle with my clothes tied in it on my lap. Once we emerged from under the jungle canopy the sun beat down on our heads. I watched the sweat slide down the bridge of her nose. I looked away, stared at the café con leche−colored water. What looked like a log was moving against the sluggish current.

  “Mom, there’s a crocodile,” I said.

  “We are not stopping,” she said.

  That cracked me up. As if.

  On the other side of the lagoon there was a rutted dirt road. We walked along in silence. I was thirsty. I had shoes on for the first time in however long and felt the blisters rising on my heels. We reached the highway headed north, stopped by the side of the road, and my mom stuck out her thumb. I toed off my shoes and my mom told me to put them back on again. I remember looking up at her with pure disbelief before tossing them into the brush. I remember seeing the bruises on her arms and one on her jaw and thinking that Luis was a pure psycho freak. Would I have had those words then? We didn’t have any TV, no radio; surely my Mennonite playmates would never know a descriptor like that. It could have come from Liam, who was quicker than me when it came to words, an excellent mimic, and could easily have heard one of the commune people say such a thing. He had been down to visit for a few weeks. Then one morning he was gone, shipped back to California.

  The highway looked brand-new. Glitter in the asphalt. Wide blue sky overhead, the sun a milky ball, cotton-puff clouds. A few cars passed, then one pulled over. A couple of longhairs headed conveniently to a town just over the border in Mexico, Chetumal.

  The longhairs knew of some Americans there, archaeologists investigating the Mayans. We camped with them until my mom was able to collect her next check, then took the train to Mexico City and flew to California. My mom would go back to Luis a few more times. She would return to British Honduras, to the house in the trees, and she would flee again, but for now we were safe in Berkeley, where my dad had opened his restaurant.

  TORTILLA AND BUTTER, PLEASE

  MY DAD’S RESTAURANT WAS called Ma Goodness, named after a book he used to read to Liam and me about a couple named Pop Corn and Ma Goodness, who lived atop neighboring hills. One day during a rainstorm they slid down into the valley in between, conked heads, and fell in love. Ma Goodness sat on the corner of Shattuck and Ashby Avenues, maybe a dozen blocks away from the university and a couple of miles away from another little hippie place called Chez Panisse. The other cook was Sheri, his new girlfriend, who was gentle and smelled like a mixture of incense and freshly baked bread and didn’t seem to have a gitana bone in her body. Even though my dad tended to like women who weren’t very maternal, Sheri was kind and I liked her a lot. On the day before the place opened my dad took about a hundred peyote buttons and put them in a pot of water and kept them on the stove all day, and to anybody who came in he’d say, “Would you care for a cup of peyote tea?” I already knew about the peyote. One day I was snooping around the new house and found a screen of buttons drying in the back of my closet.

  The neighborhood was a mix of commercial and residential and we lived in a guesthouse, a little cedar-shingled three-room place behind the home of a doctor and his wife. It had an upstairs and a downstairs and for the first time Liam and I each had our own bedroom. In the morning I could look down in the yard and watch my dad doing yoga. It was summer, all the windows open, the fresh smell of eucalyptus trees and the tangy smell of salt and fish coming off the bay, the smell of pot, and also, depending on the day, my dad’s vegetarian lasagna.

  He was a good cook. He didn’t have a lot of experience but enough to make it work. When he was in college at NYU he tended bar and cooked at a few Manhattan restaurants. After my parents first moved to Berkeley he was a waiter at some fancy place in Marin. Every day I watched him get in his van dressed in black pants, a white dress shirt, and fancy red vest. Away he would go to carve chateaubriand and assemble Caesar salads tableside. At Ma Goodness he ditched the steak. Vegetarianism was big in Berkeley. Avocados and sprouts dominated every lunch menu. My dad knew a couple, regular patrons of the restaurant—he a rail-thin black dude, she a
buxom white-girl hippie chick—who subsisted entirely on wheatgrass.

  The only thing I missed about living in British Honduras was chopping down bullet trees and riding them to the ground. I was developing a knack for adapting and making do, for figuring out in the moment how to have the maximum amount of fun. In our neighborhood, the next best thing to riding bullet trees was jumping off the roof.

  Greg Serber, my best friend from Malcolm X Elementary School, where I was failing second grade, lived nearby in a house with a detached garage set back on the property, shielded from street view by a row of plum trees. We would climb one of the trees to get to the roof, then do our best pro-baseball pitcher imitation and hurl plums down the driveway as hard as we could. When we got bored of that, we’d jump off the roof into a sandy barbecue pit on the other side. When we got bored of that, we’d pick more plums, the really ripe ones, find Liam, and tackle him to the ground. One of us would sit on him while the other stuck the plums down his pants, then smash them in with the heels of our hands.

  One of the things I noticed as I stood on Greg Serber’s garage was all the kids riding their bikes and skateboards up and down the sidewalk, weaving between the strolling hippie student pedestrians and stoner panhandlers, bunny-hopping off the curb and doing wheelies. Now that I was older and lived in a regular urban neighborhood I saw all the other things boys our age were given without a thought—the skateboards, the baseball bats and gloves, the basketball hoop in the driveway.

  Liam and I had never wanted for anything because I hadn’t known there was anything to want. There were always enough adults around to see that we were fed and watered. When it was warm we ran around naked, and when it got cold some adult made sure we were dressed. If these basics weren’t provided, if we wanted a snack and one wasn’t forthcoming, we foraged for ourselves. We never had to ask to go outside, be excused, or watch another half hour of cartoons. We did pretty much whatever we wanted, and slept where we collapsed at the end of the day.