by Mark Richard
The swagger also helps hide the pain, your pelvis is cracking and your femurs are flattening from lifting dredge gear, lifting eighty-pound wire baskets of scallops and carrying them across a rolling wet deck, standing for hours as you shuck in the constant movement of heavy weather. The pain is so perfect that it has a color, its color is silver. You can only sleep because of total exhaustion, or a draw from a pipe, or a pill from a mayonnaise jar someone is passing around. Even then, the bone-on-bone silver perfect pain sends you out-of-body while you are below deck in your bunk next to the engine room. Sometimes you hover over the trawler looking down on the other watch working, and one night, shipping out of Key West, you out-of-bodied back to the island from your at-sea anchorage, and you saw a girl you’d been interested in with another guy wearing a white fedora with a black band around it, and when you got in later and asked her about it, she said it was true.
You are thinking about the girl down on the Outer Banks, the seventeen-year-old, and you slip away from your crewmates to call her from a pay phone, charging the call to your parents’ number. It must be two or even four in the morning. You don’t realize the operator will call your parents’ house to get authorization to bill the call to their number. The operator wakes your parents up, and your father answers the phone and gives his permission, thinking you are calling collect, and then waits for you to come on the line, and you never do. Your mother later says that your father sat at his rolltop desk in the dark for a long time holding the old black receiver to his ear, waiting to hear your voice before finally hanging up and getting back into bed, where she says she could hear him not sleeping until it was time for him to get up and go to work at the paper mill.
ONE DAY A STORM BRINGS YOU HOME to find that they have bulldozed all the shacks around where you and Steve live; the power and water to yours have been cut, but you continue to sleep there. You hot-wire the current and find the water main. The same storm brings Steve home early, and you try some false hilarity for a while: the storm has washed thousands of pounds of green bananas and broken crates up onto the beach. With the salvaged lumber you two build a new front porch and steps to your place, placating for a while the guy who owns it when he finds you squatting. But by Thanksgiving you and Steve go your separate ways, and by Christmas you are on Marathon Key, Florida, watching smugglers unload bales of pot one night at a public dock under the direction of a deputy sheriff. Art and his best friend, caught up in a disagreement concerning Art sleeping with the best friend’s wife, had let their subchaser sink at a dock far short of the Caribbean. In your and Art’s southernmost misadventures you spend a night in Cuban custody along with other fishing-boat crews trying to ransom refugees out of Mariel when Castro temporarily opens the port. Art had refused to take the convicts the authorities loaded onto your boat; they weren’t on the list of relatives the Miami nationals had given you when you’d left Marathon Key. It was either relent or remain in jail, and so you and Art relent, locking yourselves in the wheelhouse on your return with a .22 rifle and a revolver, keeping a wary eye on the dozens of prison-pale men who lounged on your decks. In the jail, you pledge to God that if ever given the chance, you’ll go home, embrace your folks, go back to school. But given the chance, you’ll head for the Outer Banks instead.
First you sell some blood and with the money you buy a bus ticket, and the bus driver threatens to put you and an underage stripper off at one point when she dances in the aisle, she’s on a drug and you just happen to be sitting next to her, it was the only seat left, you try to tell the bus driver. You wake up in a bus-terminal yard and it’s dark and you and the underage stripper are the only ones left on the bus. You go into the bus station and see that you have missed your connection so you wait for hours for the next bus home, drink beer with some bums near a pay phone, and finally, when you get home, the bus lets you off in front of the dry cleaners that is behind the ice-cream parlor where the local nurseryman’s eldest son is buying an ice-cream cone with his boyfriend from out of town. They give you a ride to your house. You have to ring the doorbell because you have long since lost your front door key. Your mother opens the door and even though you have not written to her or your father in at least four months and you haven’t called either and they’ve had no idea where you’ve been or whether you are alive or dead, your mother lets you into the house, you can’t read her face, she is a stranger opening the front door. You come in and drop your sea bag in the hall and you come into the living room and then you see that she has set a place for you at the dining room table and she has made your favorite meal. For some reason known only to mothers and to God she has known that today is the day that you will be coming home.
STEVE AND A BUDDY HAD SWUNG through Key West on their way back from a dive in the Dry Tortugas at the height of shrimping season, with hundreds of trawlers working out of Stock Island and the Singleton docks. The very first stranger they stopped and asked if he knew you was a guy you’d met from New Bern, North Carolina, who was running a stolen-bicycle operation from a boat he and a cohort were painting, hundreds of bikes stacked in the hold. You’d met the New Bern guy when he’d tried to steal your tandem bicycle, which you’d left unchained in front of Sloppy Joe’s. The bicycle thieves were later found murdered in their bunks. You were glad to see Steve, and when you drift north, back down to the Outer Banks, you find him living in a trailer on the canal in Wanchese, his yard littered with busted and ongoing business transactions, surfboards, outboard motors, dead cars, a Harkers Island rig, and a homemade houseboat that was slowly sinking at the dock despite the array of car-battery-powered bilges Steve had rigged to keep it afloat.
SATAN DEMANDS TO SIFT US like sand through his fingers, and God, knowing everything, allows it. You stand on a chair at a table full of friends at a soundside bar not far from Jockey’s Ridge, everyone beered and jazzed up on white powder, and you suddenly stand wearing black sunglasses because even at night in your circumstances, light hurts your eyes, and you want an amen from the table, and they give you an amen, and you start a ranting preach about the coming of the Lord in glo-ree. Jee-zuz be praised, and your table is laughing and shouting Tell it! as you have all seen this firsthand, and you proceed to tell it, you proceed to tell the parable of Jesus At the Carwash, and it begins, Jesus saw a man, yuh, walking along the highway, yuh, and you preach the gospel and compare it to the wash, rinse, and wax cycle of a carwash where Jesus is singing hymns and slinging rags on the hoods of cars in the parking lot, and, word of the Lord, you shout out for hallelujahs from the whole place at the end, and the whole place complies, shouting praise and ordering another round, and in the men’s room later a man comes up to you and says, Brother, where do you preach? and you have to tell him you don’t preach, you’re not a preacher, you were just messing around, and the man looks at you for a while, he may have come in late and just caught the praises, and he’s disappointed at first that you don’t preach nearby, and then he realizes the depth of the deception, and he’s so disappointed in you that you go out in the parking lot and wait there for the rest of your crowd to finally come out much later.
YOU AND STEVE USE A BOOTH in a restaurant in South Nags Head as an office from which to work your scams, Steve having recently started going out with a waitress there. You have taken on the names of Sven and Sven, dreaming up business ventures over home-style platters and free draft beer: taxis for drunks, boat painting. The people in charge of the boat railway where Steve has hoisted a prison warden’s boat, the hull of which he’d been hired to scrape and repaint, notify him that his time has run out, so you run down there and slap anti-fouling paint onto the hull even as the railway owners are sliding the boat back into the water. You apply a wavy waterline from a rowboat.
The warden, a quiet man, comes down to check your progress one day. Mark and Stephen, he says; one was stoned, and the other was a prophet. At that time you are confused as to which was which. The warden likes you guys until you take his boat out all day when the Spanish mackerel
are running, and in the afternoon, when you and Steve come back with hundreds of dollars’ worth of fish, there is the warden on the dock with a flock of lost children he is trying to shepherd from errant paths. They’d been waiting for you to return the boat for hours. Those are some terrible faces on those children.
YOU TAKE ONE LAST TRIP with the notorious captain, this time earning the right to step aboard just as his trawler is about to leave the dock. You’d learned enough so that you are actually able to run the winches and read the lorans. With the money, you fulfill your promise to your father and return to your little college in a battered truck and with a beard, wild girlfriend only temporarily in tow. At Christmastime, when you go to her family’s house, her sister, the one you should have met, says, having had a lot to drink, that the family is surprised that you are as normal as you are, since most everybody thinks your girlfriend is literally insane. That explains a lot. You take a last writing class with Jim Boatwright, and write about being on a trawler during a storm that rolls the trawler over and the captain has a heart attack and you and the rest of the crew, all teenagers, have to bring the boat back to the dock, the captain nailed into a locker because his body was getting all bruised up rolling around the floor of his cabin, autobiographical. You make two short films violating film school policy that cameras were not to leave the little Virginia town limits. You take the best camera down to Rodanthe on the Outer Banks both times. The first film is about a guy whose insane girlfriend leaves him and he decides not to stalk her. The second is about a lonely plane spotter, binoculars up to an empty sky, living in a tent in the dunes during World War II. One night something crawls out of the surf, disembowels him on the beach, and then slips back beneath the waves. The star of the film is your friend with the melted face. Once, drunk, coming back from a lacrosse game, you two were walking along, and some people in a car were staring at him, and he leaned into their window as they leaned away and said, I don’t care anymore! Your film professor likes both of your films. You watch them now and realize how empty and bleak and beautiful the seascape was back then, enhanced by the grainy black-and-white film, the foam, the birds, the sand, all shades of grey in the monochromatic winter light.
AFTER GRADUATION FROM COLLEGE, you’re living in your truck, driving through the country with a sleeping bag and a Coleman stove. You dig foundations for the world’s largest shopping mall in South Carolina. You stay with your Cajun aunt and uncle in Louisiana, where your Uncle James tries to get you on with the union in the pipefitter’s apprentice program. Meanwhile, you are working digging irrigation ditches, and one day you go into a convenience store to buy some beer and check out the magazines. There’s an Atlantic Monthly in the rack, and you are surprised to see that you are a finalist in their American short story contest; the judge is John Updike. Boatwright had entered your trawler story without telling you. You swing the nose of your truck homeward.
YOU RENT A LITTLE HOUSE on the Chesapeake Bay and support yourself taking pictures of houses for a realtor. A publisher sees the Atlantic Monthly and sends you a letter asking if you have a novel, so you write a science fiction novel called The Bug Hunters. It’s about shrimp farming in space on an aquatic planet where a father and a son shoot it out with .38 revolvers and there are Brazilian seafood pirates devoured by large eels. You send it to Boatwright for his opinion, and he sends you a note telling you, You’re wasting your time and your talent. But you can’t think of anything to write, so you read the Russian novelists.
You find a new girlfriend, and your new girlfriend’s family has lived on a small island in the Chesapeake Bay since the beginning of time. Her father is a ship captain, and she can tap-dance. The realtor is letting you live in a falling-down house at the end of a partially submerged road, and it’s on the grounds of an old Indian summer camp. The place is so haunted that some nights you drive completely around Mobjack Bay to spend the night with your girlfriend or her family.
One night when the girlfriend is looking at the scars across your hips and up and down the sides of your legs, she says she thinks the problem with your hips is a good thing, that without it you’d be an even bigger asshole than you already are.
The realtor drives a canary yellow Eldorado and wears madras shirts and is a good old boy selling waterfront estates to the Germans. He has seen you have a way of talking to the rich people about the history of the places, his properties are one river over from Jamestown and Williamsburg, and you have deeply read the history of the area. This place dates from 1690, the original part of that farm is that long building they use for the barn now, note the long narrow gun ports through which they pointed their muskets at the Indians. Once, John Lennon and Yoko Ono come down and look at the place where there’s the ghost of the girl who broke her neck on the staircase, but you never see her. When John Lennon and Yoko Ono buy the place, the first thing they do is put salt in the corners of the rooms to keep the ghosts away. Once, you are telling a rich German about the 250-year-old estate, and he cuts you off, saying, Humff! Ze first thing I do is bulldoze it! You have to tell him you don’t think the Historical Commission is going to let him do that. You go up in the realtor’s plane and take pictures for the brochures you are putting together, and the realtor wants to know what you want, how about selling the big estates with him, but you load up your truck and move to Richmond with your new girlfriend, whom you’ve convinced to go to college.
In Richmond, you work for a con artist selling coupon books, you work at the Capitol stuffing envelopes, your girlfriend gives you a black eye when you accidentally kiss a friend of hers after an Easter parade. After the breakup, you live with your friend David in Washington, D.C., where you run a copy machine for the National Organization for Women and stuff more envelopes for Ralph Nader. You see the police shoot a man at the National Monument in some sort of standoff protest. The Washington Post headline reads, “Lone Crusader Against Nuclear Madness Slain by Police.” The Washington Times says, “Mad Bomber Thwarted.” You can’t pay your rent, so you camp out at a writers colony for a few weeks and read books by Graham Greene and Malcolm Lowry and write a story based on Art and his best friend’s wife.
You drive to Virginia Beach and in the classified ads find a job with a small ad agency writing copy for pizza and brassieres. It’s a small shop the owners are running up their noses. One day a guy comes in looking for the owners, and you tell him they’ve gone “skiing,” and you ask him if you can help him. He sits down and says he had an argument with his father, who publishes a small military newspaper, and he just bought the newspaper from his father but has no idea how to do the editorial stuff, the writing, all he knows is sales. You tell him look no further, you are his man.
THE NEWSPAPER SUITS YOU, it’s all about the Navy and its ships. On the way out of D.C., you had tried to enlist in the Navy, and they wouldn’t have you because of your hips. You even drove to the merchant marine school in Piney Point, Maryland, and they wouldn’t have you either. The owner of the newspaper is a big, fearless, boisterous guy with a beard who reminds you of the pioneer in the TV show who lives on the frontier with a pet grizzly bear. His wife, who keeps the books, is a pretty Cuban girl with a nice Tidewater accent. She keeps a sharp edge on her accounting pencil and on her carving knife at home. You know the front office will be secure, and it looks as though you can bank a steady paycheck of ninety dollars a week because money is tight and you don’t care, and after all the sales and layout people go home, you and the owner and his wife run the vacuums and mops and brooms and then go have nice dinners at a restaurant that advertises in your newspaper and pays in trade.
Your editorial desk is in a room with a gaggle of salesgirls, some of whom have substance and boyfriend problems. A couple will come back from long lunches disheveled and clammy, and will brag about landing a new account in the backseat at a used-car lot or in a quiet corner of a bed and mattress showroom. The girls are funny and loud, and you like them a lot.
In the back the layout people are
generally potheads who share their dope and tell you when good funk bands are coming to town.
Overall it’s a good place, and you fill the pages with your name and several of your pseudonyms. You cover the world’s largest naval base and its air wings, NATO, the shipyards, the weapons centers, and anything else that interests you, and it all does. You interview admirals and senators, enlisted men, pilots, and junior intelligence officers in their crisp khaki skirts whom you talk into taking you into the restricted areas down in Dam Neck. You write editorials for the Op-Ed page, and you write scathing letters under fake names back to yourself, and you write letters the next week in answer to those, and you feel like Mark Twain, and it’s a lot of fun to feel like Mark Twain.
AFTER A FEW MONTHS the circulation increases, your boss and his wife have put the business plan into effect that he had argued with his father about, and the base in enjoying all the coverage you are giving them. Ronald Reagan helps, saying his goal is to have a six-hundred-ship Navy. You get a raise, and your boss trades some ad space to a high-rise on the beach where you can live in a penthouse for free. You have been living in a cheap motel on the Virginia Beach strip with a drummer from the Hilton house band, a tall buff Jewish kid named Kenny. It is a transient kind of place. One night there is a fight upstairs among some redneck construction workers building a hotel next door, and somebody goes out the second-story window and lands on the hood of a car outside your window. The roommate of the girl you found who almost bled out on the Outer Banks works in housekeeping. In the evenings you mix manhattans in a plastic hospital bedside water pitcher that a previous tenant had left and wait for your roommate to come home at 1:00 a.m. because it’s no use going to sleep when the band shows up ready to unwind. You catnap until 8:00 a.m. and get in your truck and go to the paper. You are young, and this is possible. Kenny says he remembered seeing you once before at the High on the Hog outdoor music festival wearing just bib overalls, no shirt, and a button on one of your overalls straps that said I SHOULD HAVE STOOD IN BED, and when a mutual friend later introduced you as a possible roommate, Kenny’s first thought was Whoa, it’s that retarded dude.