by Paul Watkins
When I arrived home from St Regis, my father sent me to work with a friend of his named Gunther.
Gunther ran a trap boat out of Newport. He had nets set down a couple of miles off shore from the Newport mansions. The nets were huge, complicated funnels that trapped whole schools of fish.
My father thought that by keeping me on the docks and on a fishing boat with the drunks and burnt-out people Gunther hired, I’d see what kind of life was waiting for me if I didn’t follow his advice.
At first I did hate the job. If he’d waited a few days and then allowed me to find a different job, I would have.
But he kept me there too long for what he had in mind. By the end of that summer, I had learned to like the trap boats.
The smells of Gunther’s dock became familiar. Fish. Diesel. Damp wood. Grease. The musty smell of chopped ice.
And I got used to the hours. Waking at four in the morning to catch an early bus to Newport and falling asleep to the sound of the evening news downstairs.
Gunther took the first twenty people who showed up at his dock each day. We had to be there by six o’clock. The pay was forty dollars. Each of us had to get his name on the sheet of yellow paper Gunther pinned up, a thick red line twenty spaces down the page. After several months of work, a person could have his name put on the list of regulars, which would be written on the sheet before it was posted. All a regular had to do was arrive by six and write a check mark next to his name.
Some of the regulars lived in the hulk of a boat that Gunther had moored next to his dock. He always talked about fixing it up but never got around to the job. The regulars slept in the bunks, on burlap sacks and old sleeping bags. Each morning in the half-light, they crawled like rats from the hatches and portholes, draped in their filthy clothes.
His work boat was named Baby Boy. It left the dock at six-fifteen, towing four aluminium skiffs used for pulling up the trap nets.
The regulars sat with Gunther in the wheelhouse, or huddled for warmth near the engine pipes in places they had claimed as theirs. Newcomers sat on the stern in shiny new rain gear – or no rain gear at all if they didn’t know what they were doing.
Fishermen who worked at Gunther’s were known by others on the docks as men who had no place else to go. They were men who had seen bad accidents or been in one and couldn’t bear to be away from land for long, but who knew no other trade except fishing. Or they were like me and too young to go out on the trawlers.
By the time we reached the nets, the sun would already be up. Dazzling like smashed glass on the water. Hurting our eyes in the glare.
The skiffs paddled around to each corner of the trap and we hauled in the nets. We clawed our hands through weed-fuzzy twine until the fish were gathered in a small enough area that they could be scooped into Baby Boy.
The net stank from fish that had tried to force their way out through the gaps, became stuck and died.
Rainbows of oil spread on the surface long before the fish began to show.
Then the water frothed with mackerel. They barrelled from one end of the net to the other, ramming the sides so hard that our skiffs dipped down with the force against the twine. Fat, purple electric rays paddled to the surface and sharks beat their way through silver sheets of menhaden.
Gunther scooped his catch onto Baby Boy with a thing like a huge butterfly net. Fish spilled over the deck until there was no room for a crewman to stand except waist-deep in the middle of them, feeling the twitch of hundreds of fish as they died in the pile.
Sometimes the net held more fish than Baby Boy could hold, and Gunther had to set some loose.
I learned from the regulars to bring tinfoil with me, along with a lemon and salt. We searched through the mass for any fish we wanted, filleted it with knives we all carried, then wrapped it in foil with lemon and salt. We baked them on the engine pipes. The pipes were thick with grease from years of cooking.
At Gunther’s dock, we unloaded the fish from his boat, boxed them in ice and were done by midday.
I worked next to a man called Kelley, shovelling ice. He stole any black bass he could find in our catch once the boat was on its way home, careful not to let Gunther see him.
Black bass were the most valuable fish Gunther ever pulled from his nets. Kelley stuffed them in a plastic bag and hid them in his overalls, then sold the fish later to a local restaurant.
He didn’t pay any taxes. Instead, he collected his money in cash and hid it some place on the dockyards in a Tupperware box. He said he couldn’t even remember his social security number.
Kelley talked about the big money a person could earn on trawlers, making two- or three-week trips off-shore.
The trouble with working off-shore trawlers was that they wouldn’t take a new crewman unless he had experience and then there was no way except on the trawlers for a new man to gain experience. Least of all from my father, who never let me set foot on his boat except when he wanted it cleaned.
I made up plans for having a boat of my own one day. I found ways around doing the dirty jobs that Gunther made the burnouts do because they couldn’t be trusted with anything else.
On the way out each morning at sunrise, I sat in the wheelhouse and made Gunther tell me how his trap nets worked, what sort of boat a person would need to pull nets, how big a crew a captain had to have. Gunther explained everything as he weaved his boat between the scattered lobster-pot buoys.
Years before, my brother Joseph and I bought a lobsterpot and set it down on a thirty foot length of rope a quarter mile off Narragansett beach. In the evenings, we borrowed a rowboat from one of the beach clubs. It was used for rescuing people who had drifted out too far. If we found a lobster in the pot, we stuffed it in a big iron kettle and rowed back to shore. We cooked the lobsters on the beach, in salt water, on fires made from driftwood. We were careful to place the boat back exactly as we had found it, overturned in the dunes with the oars stored underneath. Joseph and I talked about running our own lobster-boat someday.
Every summer through my high school years, I worked for Gunther. I became one of the regulars, and could have run the boat as well as Gunther.
My mother and father didn’t stop me, but they made things difficult at home.
Summer became a time of slammed doors and sighing, with things not said and ugly lengths of silence at the table. While my father was in port, he’d let me take a couple of hours rest from Gunther’s before driving me down to the Galilee docks and putting me to work on his boat, a ninety-five foot, steel-hulled trawler named Glory B. As long as I lived at home, he said, there would be chores to do.
Dad liked to keep his engines ticking over at the dock. He gave me a bucket of water and told me to scrub out the engine room. He had me cleaning pipes that didn’t need to be cleaned and scrubbing the floor which had been scrubbed so many times the paint was worn off.
I’d climb down a steel ladder to the engine room and see him watching me from the deck. He wore baseball hats with foam padding on the front and plastic mesh at the back. He wore his hats until the mesh holes were completely clogged with engine grease and dirt.
On my knees scrubbing and scrubbing, the two vast Cat engines thundering in neutral on either side of me, I’d look up sometimes through trickles of sweat and see him standing at the top of the ladder.
When he saw me looking, he’d turn away.
Once I stood and yelled at him. ‘Why doesn’t Joseph have to do this?’
His voice barely rose above the hammer of the engines. ‘Joseph has problems of his own.’
I dropped back on my knees and kept scrubbing.
When I raised my head a few minutes later, he was still there. Just standing there. Tall and thin and weathered.
Joseph had a plan to make a million.
The plan didn’t work and he found himself heavily in debt. He lived at home to avoid paying rent on an apartment. The plan came from a man he met in the restaurant of a hotel when he was in Massachusetts interviewing f
or the First Bank of Boston. This was in his last year at business school.
The restaurant had been doubling people up at tables because of crowds.
The man sat next to my brother. He said he was a dealer in solar panels, and told my brother about an idea to use little solar cells, like the ones you find in pocket calculators, to run an address file.
The file would hold phone numbers and addresses like any other, except this one would turn automatically when you pressed a button, powered by a solar cell that could pick up its light from a desk lamp as well as the sun.
The man asked Joseph if he thought it would be a good idea. It was something he’d just thought up. Popped into his head only the night before. The man was dying for an opinion, he said. Would it work? Would anybody buy the thing?
Joseph told him maybe so.
The offer from First Boston didn’t sound as good as this new idea to sell solar-panelled address files, so he turned them down.
When he got home he stole the idea, patented it and took out a big loan from the bank to begin production.
In the first weeks, while parts to the machine were being built, Joseph drove to different chain stores and tried to get them interested in buying. He hard-talked them the way he’d learned to hard-talk in business school. At home he read books about subliminal persuasion and martial arts books to get himself in the right frame of mind. He wouldn’t leave the stores until they’d at least said maybe.
All through the autumn my last year of high school, I watched his car pull in over fallen oak leaves in the driveway.
Each day it was the same.
The car would stop and for a while he’d stay at the wheel, staring at the lawnmower and old rakes at the back of the garage. His car looked dusty from being on the road.
Then Joseph would get out, set his briefcase on the hood and stretch, untucking his shirt with the movement.
He’d shut the car door with his foot, walk across the gravel driveway to the back door and disappear into the kitchen.
I watched this through the mosquito screen of my bedroom window.
I’d hear nothing for a bit and then the sound of the TV being switched on.
After that, I’d go back to lifting free weights at my bench, listening to the car click and mutter itself quiet in the garage and to Joseph in the kitchen telling Mother what he did all day.
The address file was mounted on a large box. This box contained the flat purpley solar panel screens.
The machine had to be directly in the light to work. When you pressed the On button, the file made a humming noise and the little pages flipped from A to Z. It had a red tab for marking the place where the file should start turning.
It came in several colours including camouflage, because Joseph thought he could get the army interested.
He contracted a local man to assemble the units and a company in Virginia made the parts. They arrived at our house in boxes of fifty, marked ‘ROLOMATIC. FRAGILE!’
After a few days of putting the Rolomatics together, the assembly man called Joseph and said he wanted more money.
So Joseph hard-talked him, too.
At home he talked about Will to Power and the Ninja of the Nuclear Age.
Sometimes I’d wake up in the night and hear the humming of Rolomatics from down in the basement where Joseph tested them with a heat lamp for keeping French fries warm. He didn’t trust the man to assemble the units correctly, so he made spot checks. Sometimes he checked only ten. Sometimes three hundred.
Some of the local chain stores agreed to put the Rolomatic in their shops to see how it would make out, but told him he’d have to wait until spring before any appeared on the shelves. In the meantime, they wanted some promotional fliers made up.
We had eight thousand Rolomatics in the basement. They had a certain smell. New and sterile.
He set Mother to work making up slogans for the fliers and paid an artist to draw the easy-to-follow instructions:
A woman’s hand pushing the On button.
The face of a man with a big chin looking at the Rolomatic and smiling because he found what he was looking for in the file.
The Rolomatic on a neat desk top, along with a typewriter and telephone and a picture of someone’s family.
Everything was black and white. Almost every sentence in the instructions had an exclamation mark at the end of it.
They decided on a slogan: ‘Rolomatic … Find Facts Fast!’
In the evenings when Joseph was home, he talked about the way he did his business.
No one could suggest a better way for doing something. No one could criticise.
Joseph stuck a message board on the door to the basement, where you could write things and wipe them off. At the top Joseph wrote ‘Suggestions’. If we had anything to say, he told us, we should write it up there and he’d see to everything in due time.
Now suddenly everything he owned was precious and not to be touched.
It made me nervous to see how much he valued the things he set around himself. There wasn’t anything I could use or borrow that he didn’t see as abused or put back in the wrong place when I’d finished with it. Wasn’t an argument I could have without his saying that he ran this house when Dad wasn’t around, and if I didn’t like that, I should think about moving on.
Joseph said he’d employ me when I graduated. My job would be to travel up and down the east coast selling Rolomatics to the big chain stores. I’d get a percentage. He’d show me the ropes.
He sold me two shares at twenty dollars apiece, sold some to Mother and Father, then went down to the docks and sold some to my father’s friends.
He rigged up an answering machine. When he made the recording, he asked my mother to type on her typewriter in the background to give it the feel of being a busy office.
Kids called up pretending to be Russians and Japanese and ordering six million camouflage Rolomatics.
*
When the chain stores displayed their spring inventory, they put the Rolomatics on their shelves and we waited for orders to come in.
Another address file arrived in the shops at the same time. It was called a Rolosomething as well. This machine was smaller and much simpler and had no solar cell
Joseph said not even to give it a thought.
It turned out that the other Rolothing was marketed by the same man Joseph stole the idea from, only the man had abandoned the idea of solar panels and gone for something cheaper.
He called several times to say that Joseph was a thief and a bastard and that anyway the solar panel idea wouldn’t work.
Joseph laughed an unnaturally long laugh and said we’d see about that soon enough.
Then he ran down to the basement and tested a thousand Rolomatics under his French fry lamp.
The Rolomatics sold well for about a week.
Then the chain stores began receiving complaints from people who said they had to hold the thing right up to a light to make it work. Sometimes the file cards became stuck and the roller wouldn’t turn. One business claimed the noise was offensive, like a poo-poo cushion being sat on. It was too big, they said, and sometimes it went off by itself.
Meanwhile, the other Rolothing sold so well it became almost a cult item. Anybody who was anybody had a Rolothing on his desk.
The chain stores took Joseph’s Rolomatic off the shelves after a month.
We still had 7,500 units in the basement.
When the Rolomatics failed, my father bought back from his friends at the dock the shares Joseph had sold them. But he never told Joseph.
I found it out from someone at the East Bay plant.
He had spent a long time listening to Joseph’s plans, nodding slowly and quietly and continuously as Joseph mapped out the possibilities.
Now with the business gone under and Joseph in debt up to his skull, my father began pulling me aside and telling me to walk with him after dinner.
‘Alls I want from you is hard and honest work. No hocus
-pocus. No damn samurai self-help books like Joseph bought. Alls I ever think about when I’m out on the water is how proud I’m going to be of you one day. I’m giving you the raw materials and you shape them into a way of living that doesn’t smell of fish and that keeps the family together. I wish my father’d have done this for me when I was young. Now, when you get a wife and kids, you can come home to them at the end of the day and still be making a living. Your mama and I don’t have that. It’s what we want for you. And when Joseph gets back on his feet, he’ll have it too. I swear to God, I never did think those dinky Rolomatics would work. Between you and me.’
I hated sitting down to dinner with my brother at the table.
The house began to smell very clean and disinfected. Nothing was ever out of place. Joseph wandered through the rooms arranging things in piles and categories. He stacked magazines exactly together and alphabetically in the basket by the sofa.
The Rolomatics in the basement seemed to me like insects, crawling over each other in the dark. Once I found him in the laundry room, long after my mother and father had gone to bed. He was sitting on the dryer with a Rolomatic held up to the bare bulb that lit the room. He moved the blank cards back and forth, set the red selection tab and moved them some more.
‘I fucked up,’ he said when he saw me. ‘I fucked up the American Dream.’
*
From high school, I graduated to the University of Southern Massachusetts, where I stayed for one year before getting in a fight with another student.
I went up in front of the Executive Committee, and they kicked me out for the rest of the semester. Two months and the summer.
The fight started over a stolen camera.
I had taken up photography as soon as I arrived at university. Photography was the only class in which I received good marks. All my other grades went to hell because of photography.
At the end of the fall semester, my maths report had said, ‘Don’t give up!’
Under the grade on my physics final, the instructor wrote, ‘Absurd.’