by Henry Hughes
“A fish?” I took offense.
“A fish outta water. You know what I mean. Just flopping there.”
Without depth recorders or sonar, we drew on experience, past scuba diving missions, recommendations, and the observed success of other anglers to locate fishy spots. On this June day there was a northwest wind and considerable swell, but the China Cat’s deep vee cut nicely, and I told Eugene about my high-seas adventure mackerel fishing with the jon boat. “That’s crazy, man,” he shook his head. There were two other boats around the point. Four black men were out in one of Ralph’s new rental skiffs fishing for porgies, and when we anchored and turned off our engine we could hear a man singing, “My baby loves porgies, so I bring her some.” Another boat with a ghostly pale figure behind the wheel motored near, a child hunkered below the windshield. “Anything?” I raised my open hands.
“No,” he shouted. “We’re not feeling so good. Weather report’s really bad. I’m heading in.”
“Take it easy,” we said. We never thought too much about weather reports—except hurricane warnings—we just looked at the sky, at the tree tops, maybe the barometer, and said, “Let’s go!”
Owning to past success, we tied on double golden hooks, size four, accented with red beads and weighted with two-ounce bank sinkers. Our bait was fresh hardshell clams. I shucked the live cold clams and cut the dense feet into one-inch strips, tossing the shells and soft bellies into a bucket. Sandworms worked well, but they were expensive and hard to find on the flats. We could dig our own big hardshells or buy them cheap off young clammers along with a bag of weed, coded “chowder.” I’d be on the phone tethered to our kitchen wall, Aunt Lil sitting there cutting coupons, and could safely ask Eugene, “Hey, did you get some chowder?”
We dropped our baits and felt little bites. “Bergalls,” Eugene grumbled, finally hooking a bluish three-inch fish, wrenching it off the hook and tossing it to a gull that swallowed it whole. Bergalls, also known as cunners, are small wrasses common to the rocky coast. I told Eugene that my kid brother had a pet bergall. In our cool basement, I set up a thirty-gallon marine tank and let my six-year-old brother bring home clams, starfish, rock crabs, and finally a bergall that lived a few years, dining on old bait and bits of turkey and roast beef. “They’re sweet fish once you get to know them,” I said. Eugene gently unhooked and released the next bergall, cooing, “Sorry little fella.”
After twenty minutes and two frustrating snags that forced break offs, we reeled up, let out another twenty feet of anchor line, and dropped again. Both Eugene and I immediately felt strong porgy hits, then nothing, retrieving bare, shining hooks. The guys in the skiff were laughing, singing, and pulling in porgies. “They’re down there,” I said. Hooking porgies requires a feel. I rebaited, dropped to the bottom, lifted the rod slowly, eased it down, then lifted again, feeling the firm rap and gently setting the hook into a solid fish.
Varieties of porgie, also called scup, bream, tai, and snapper, are known in temperate coastal waters around the world. Deep and broad, like a freshwater sunfish, but at home in current-swept rocky bottoms and sandy shoals, the fish is an angler’s delight, fighting well and flashing up to the light like brass bells layered in pearlescent turquoise and purple. They are also good eating.
After Eugene hooked and landed another nice porgy, I dumped the clam bellies, shells, and some crushed mussels into a paper bag plumbed with rocks and tethered to a cord. It was an old chumming trick Herbie taught me. Lowered into the water, the paper bag quickly softened; once on the bottom, a firm pull on the cord broke it open, releasing a cloud of appetizers.
The fishing got hot, and we were catching porgy after porgy, sometimes two at a time, letting go lots of small fish. Like the guys in the skiff, we also talked it up—“Oh, yeah, porgy time”—and started singing our own version of “My baby loves porgies.” This was not serene, contemplative fishing; there were no analyses of the human condition or cosmological inquiries. Rather it was a picking party, and we just got silly. “Porgie time, brother!” I called, swinging another brassy bream into the China Cat; Eugene responded, “Here come another.”
I have been on party boats where thirty men and women—white, black, Italian, Puerto Rican, Vietnamese, Brooklyn Jew, and born-again Christian—would chatter, swing, and sing, deliriously drunk on porgies. And on more than one occasion I’ve actually heard folks sing lines from the musical Porgy and Bess. Porgies electrify the rod, but they lack the sober gravity of the flounder and fluke or the fierce magnetism of the pelagic bluefish, who bolts through the water gnashing his teeth. Some fish make us predatorily serious; porgies make us goofy, their dorky, long sloped faces raise joviality and musical theatre.
I was rambling on about porgies when Eugene’s rod jumped and bent deeply, pulsing down as he cranked on the reel. “Double?” I asked.
“Don’t think so,” he said. “Feels like a black.”
He was definitely into a big fish that didn’t sport the erratic flutter and juke of a porgy but pulled hard and steady toward the rocks. Sure enough, up came the marbled dark sides and beige belly of a big blackfish, also known as tautog. I grabbed the net, scooped head first, and boated the bull, easily eight pounds. The guys on the skiff cheered, and I noticed their boat pitching pretty high in the waves. Then they pulled anchor and waved goodbye.
Eugene and I talked about the blackfish’s name. They weren’t really black, more of a smoky dark marble.
“Like people. I mean, who’s really white or black?” I pointed to my black Van Halen concert shirt leaping with a very white David Lee Roth.
“Mookie Wilson’s pretty black,” Eugene cited the Mets’ center fielder.
“And I guess Cheryl Ladd’s pretty white,” I offered up one of Charlie’s Angels. “Maybe we can get them to do a porn movie together.” Both of us fell into crazy laughter.
I wondered aloud if the blackfish’s big lips had contributed to its name. The names of the Florida jewfish and the American Northwest’s squawfish have been found objectionable by some people. Sadly, there’s even a Caribbean grouper that for years was called the niggerfish.
“Pretty racist, hah?” Eugene said.
“Old caricature,” I shrugged, remembering a social studies lesson illustrated with racist depictions of black people as coons, monkeys, and distorted minstrel clowns. The teacher showed us a 1941 Universal Pictures cartoon where thick-lipped Southern blacks dozed away in “Lazy Town.” A man asleep in a boat fished with lines tied to his toes, but even the fish were asleep in the river below. There were plenty of racist jokes still in the air when I grew up on Long Island, but I was white and didn’t feel the sting. And though we jokingly tagged the fleet of rental skiffs, “The Puerto Rican Navy,” and called the town pier crowded with Asians, “Dinky Dock,” there was more diversity and amiable camaraderie in fishing than in any other activity I knew. Fishing stations, public piers, and party fishing boats were multicultural centers of contemporary recreation that often included more than a few women. Fishing also crossed Long Island’s money lines. Laid-off laborers in leaky little skiffs fished the same waters as vacationing doctors on million-dollar game boats.
Around all our fishing and talking, the sound had grown raw with whitecaps. It became harder to stand, our thighs bruising against the gunnels, our bagels rolling off the dashboard. Eugene knelt on the bow deck and began weighing anchor, spray coming over us. The engine started on the first pull—always a relief—and I held the wheel and watched. “Goddamnit,” Eugene growled. “The anchor’s fucking stuck.” As he pulled, we rolled into a deep trough and a wave soaked us.
“Wrap it on the cleat. I’ll run over it,” I shouted. Eugene was quick, and we gunned forward against the jammed anchor flukes and freed them. He pulled up the line and chain, dumped the anchor on deck, and jumped onto the bench with me. We climbed and rode the growing gray waves toward the Port Jeff inlet. China Cat would go deep into a trough and climb out, cresting and surfing down another wave,
sometimes bow shoveling, sending a wall of water over us. Cresting one wave that was, itself, cresting, the whole boat vibrated as the prop spun out of the water. Then we plunged down and the anchor spilled off the bow. “Fuck!” I yelled. Eugene grabbed the rope and started pulling it back. We should’ve let the whole thing go because when I eased off the throttle, the boat yawed sideways, everything on board tipping over and rolling across the floor, water pouring in from the side. The anchor crashed into the hull, but Eugene got it in, and I throttled up and turned hard into the next crest. One of the spokes snapped off the steering wheel, but everything came up straight. Eugene bailed and I steered, and without another word between us, we strained and planed back through the inlet and into the safe harbor, turning east for the calm of Seaboard Hole. “That was fucking crazy, man,” Eugene said. He dog-shook his wet head and handed me a Bud as a porgy swam over the floorboards between our feet.
Some days we took girls out fishing. A sunny, warm mid-afternoon high tide was ideal. We’d pick up our dates on the dock at noon and fish for about three hours. Sometimes Tim and his new girlfriend, Cindy, would join us. Cindy was thoughtful. “Are you okay?” she touched my hands, red and swollen from fish bites, hook pricks, and lines that had cut into the joints of my fingers.
“They’re fine,” I said, opening and closing them like a crab on its back. “But I’ll probably never wear a wedding ring.”
“I don’t know about that,” Cindy smiled. She and a couple of her friends really liked boating, and I often found them more patient and careful anglers than my guy friends with more experience. If it got hot, the girls would strip down to bikinis. The sight of their bodies excited me more than a leaping bluefish. I leaned into the gunnels to push down my shorts. My life’s dreams definitely included women, but I never dreamed of being married.
After fishing, we’d sometimes dock at the flourishing new Ralph’s Fishing Station at the mouth of Mt. Sinai Harbor, say hello to Ralph and Barbara, buy some beer (no ID required), and motor over to Crystal Brook for a bit of scuba diving. I had learned to scuba dive when I was fourteen, taking the course at Port Diver with three sets of couples on their way to Bermuda. One of the guys in the class asked the instructor if it was okay to dive after having a few drinks, and the instructor exclaimed, “No!” So I always got everyone to hold off on the beer until we finished our dive.
I loved everything about scuba diving—the way the wetsuit streamlined my chubby body into a smooth seal, the spacey magic of neutral buoyancy, and the ever-amazing view of underwater life. The visibility off Long Island’s north shore was often poor, however, and our best dives were right along the bottom in shallow water on calm, bright days. Eugene, Tim, Cindy, and I went diving around Crystal Brook one Monday after the July Fourth weekend, and I found a little gold ring. When we climbed back on the boat I gave the ring to Cindy. I’m not sure why. Tim later told me that he’d be the one giving his girlfriend rings and that I should hang on to my junk.
If we were fishing around Port Jefferson, we’d often beach the China Cat at Seaboard Hole, stretch out on towels, drinking, smoking, talking, and swimming in the warm water. I loved swimming, but even with a bit of a buzz, I still felt self-conscious about my body. If I pulled off my T-shirt, I’d get right in the water or lie flat on a towel. Night was best, my body veiled in dark water or the swirling glow of phosphorescence.
In my junior year of high school, in 1981, I locked eyes with a girl at a festival sponsored by the Catholic Church with beer and wine where no one checked ID. Theresa was a voluptuous Italian-American with dark skin and thick black hair that smelled faintly of jasmine and garlic. We drank red wine and strolled down to the water for a long talk and a goodnight kiss. Theresa lived in Belle Terre, an affluent community overlooking Port Jefferson Harbor and the Sound, and I would learn that her family had money, spent vacations in Europe and the Caribbean, chatted about World Cup soccer, art, and continental philosophy. They were also nice to me, a construction worker’s son from the other side of town. When I sat on their leather couch, Theresa’s cat would climb on my lap and purr.
Theresa, a year older, was experienced with sex, and she gently led me into deeper, warmer water. On breezy beach evenings and nights around the campfire we kissed and touched each other, her olive skin smooth and lotioned in coconut, my scarred and calloused hands redolent of bait. One night sometime after my sixteenth birthday, we walked far down the beach, laid out our towels, slipped off our clothes, and Theresa guided me inside her.
Although driven hard by the flesh, I also felt something like love for this dark and mysterious girl, Theresa. How do we come to feel this way about a stranger? “Who are you?” I asked her one night while we made love in the dark. She laughed—maybe at my question or the impossibly of answering it—and I could feel the vibrations of her laughter pass through her diaphragm and into my body.
After sex, we rolled back on towels under the stars and talked about our families, the living and the dead, and she believed there were mystical connections between us all. Theresa felt she knew my mother, though they’d never met. She said that my mother asked her to care for me, to love me, and help me. I did not believe such communication was possible, but I did not deny Theresa her beliefs.
“Don’t worry, your mother is watching,” Aunt Lil said as I left the house for our playoff football game in November of 1982. For two seasons I started as right guard for our high school varsity team. We ran a wing-T, reverse-rich offense, and nothing felt better than pulling and charging full speed at a confused defensive end, burying my shoulder into his hip, and folding him like a straw. In my senior year, we were undefeated league champs, losing that Saturday in the first round of the playoffs 7-0 to Deer Park. It was a long intense season, and for a while it consumed me more than fishing. And unlike fishing, my father absolutely loved football. I walked off the field, bruised and dirty, and saw him coming down from the stands. My father had been to every game but was always thrifty on praise. He walked up to me, smiled, and said, “You did good.”
“We lost,” I said.
“I watched. You did your job. Hey, I know there’ll be a big party tonight. But maybe we should go fishing tomorrow.”
“Me and you?”
“Sure, why not?” My father and I hadn’t fished together in a long time. We didn’t need to. He liked me—I knew that—but he didn’t like to fish.
“That’s all right, Dad. You watch the Jets. I’ll take David with me.”
“Well, that’s a good idea. If it’s not too cold. He’d love that.”
I woke up hungover on Sunday and took my seven-year-old brother surfcasting off Cedar Beach. My brother loved fish and water and was easy company, casting clams and reeling in sea robins and small flounder. The sand- and shell-dotted shallows glowed gold, the deeper water beyond darkening to a bruised purple. “Why can’t we see into that water?” my brother asked, and I explained about light and refraction and all the creatures living in the cold sound that make it thick and hazy. “So it’s different than a swimming pool,” he said. “Right,” I nodded, wondering how much smarter we’d be if we could see more clearly through space and time. I thought about the game, what I did right and wrong. If I had beaten my guy on a couple more plays we might have scored and won. Correctible mistakes appeared clearly today, but so did my limitations. I played hard but lost, and that was it. We couldn’t see into the deeper water where our sinkers landed, we could only see the fish we dragged from its realm.
Swimming
I got a job as the mate aboard a charter fishing boat, Misty, captained by Ron, a forty-something air traffic controller who got fired when President Reagan broke their strike in 1981. Ron cashed in his retirement and took a chance on a thirty-eight-foot game boat out of Port Jefferson. His wife screamed, his daughter cried, his friends thought it was great.
On a breezy morning in July, I was getting the boat ready and our clients came down, a young couple and their two boys who were maybe ten an
d seven. Things always felt a bit awkward when customers first came aboard. People were unsure where to put their things, what to do, or where to sit. I turned on a small brass lamp in the cabin and made coffee, started the engine, and told them Captain Ron was on his way and they should relax. The father’s name was Bob, and we started talking. He was working as an air traffic controller. Scab, I shuddered, hoping it didn’t get mentioned to Ron. Beth was Bob’s wife. She looked at our Blues sign in the window and said she never cooked bluefish. Was it any good? I described our recipe where we soaked the fillets in milk before grilling them. “Delicious,” I said. Bob asked if we’d fish for flounder. I said flounders ran in spring and fall, and we wouldn’t work the bottom unless the blues weren’t biting. “I only eat flounder,” Bob told me. I shrugged and went to work rigging for bluefish.
Captain Ron hopped aboard, said a quick hello, filled his coffee mug, and went up to the bridge. He was lean with a smooth, beardless face and dark hair cut above the ears. He wore a blue cap and a navy nylon jacket with Misty silk-screened on the back. At his signal I freed the ropes, and there was a blast of gray smoke, the prop churning roily flowers that bloomed across the surface. We turned from the dock and cut across the choppy harbor. The boys, Peter and Sid, were leaning against the sides, pointing to the high sandy bluffs of Belle Terre. “That’s where my girlfriend lives,” I told the boys and they made yuck faces. Theresa had spent the last year at college studying child development and education. When she came back our relationship wasn’t the same. She talked about being a teacher and finding a nice house. I wanted to be an explorer and angle new waters. I wasn’t sure if she took me seriously, and we had less and less to talk about.