But my brother’s pilgrimages to the house were like clockwork. On Friday evenings he would take the Long Island Rail Road to Great Neck and then a taxi to the house. Before knocking on the door Bill would stand on the flagstone path soaking in suburban privilege and glamour. He savored the smell of the newly cut grass, the weeping willow on the front lawn was becoming full and majestic, he noticed the little blocks of Spanish tile that Mother had cemented into the crown of the garage that had been renovated into her studio. He walked to the rock garden, weeded a little beside Mother’s Morris Minor, which had no windows and was beginning to rust badly. He giggled. Such a ridiculous car, perfect for Mom.
Dad tried to be patient with Bill. Abe’s throat was bothering him from the radiation treatments. He was focused on his bodily needs, the rumbling of his stomach, caring for his colostomy. Dad was impeccable, changed his bag frequently, washing himself with astringents. Many patients who had these operations died of infection because they weren’t careful. On these weekends together in the house Dad and Bill were separate planets. Abe didn’t know where his son was coming from. He tried to constrain his anger. He smiled.
But there were muted grudges all around. From past years Bill could hear his father yelling at Mom for dripping paint on the carpet or losing twenty bucks or Dad blasting him for his long hair or not doing his homework or an awkwardness in the workshop or not coming to eat on time. When he was little Bill had loved to hide in the dark basement, fooling with the cats, wouldn’t answer when he was called. There had been evenings he was sent to bed without dinner. Mother or Winnie quietly climbed the stairs, handing delicious secret meals over the Dutch doors.
The stodgy four-bedroom brick house on Locust Drive had become my brother’s temple. Dad promised never to sell it. Bill didn’t want anything more from his father than that. His smile for his father was formal, almost patronizing. What’s wrong with this kid? Dad would swallow his anger, write checks in the den. Bill walked through the living room luxuriating in the soft celadon wall-to-wall carpet. He opened and closed the little drawers of the Early American hutch. What furniture. Someday it would all be his. He spun the center piece of the broad, beautifully finished lazy Susan on Mother’s great round table. This always gave him delight.
Half the time Dad was away on business when Bill visited the house. He spent lazy afternoons watching TV with Winnie while she folded laundry. One time Dad came in from the airport, went into his bedroom for a nap. After an hour and a half he came out wide-eyed and roaring at Winnie for piling potatoes into his sock drawer. Winnie’s face was blank, uncomprehending. Bill became furious at Dad for making such a scene over Winnie’s little mistake.
I kept up my drumming with Auchee Lee, which may have been an error. Although he was in high school himself Auchee was already lead percussionist for the great jazz flutist Herbie Mann. I was good, but Auchee was a giant, understood the soul of rhythm and built conga solos that had people flying out of their seats at the Village Gate. Auchee’s lukewarm encouragement for my drumming was painful. I would respond by describing blue marlin fishing off the north side of Bimini Island to this little black boy from Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side. Someday we would go trolling together in the blue water, I promised. He didn’t know what to say. I liked it that my friends knew nothing about marlin.
I considered my arty sojourns with Mom a diversion. I lived for fishing trips and talking the trade with my father. Dad’s smiling face was on the cover of the New England Electrical News. He was salesman of the month! Abe was hot as a pistol, as he put it, landed high-risers in Cleveland and L.A., each needed more than twenty thousand fluorescents. I couldn’t keep up with the numbers, with our success. Fixtures were limitless like the giant bluefin and marlin off Bimini in the spring and summer. Dad owned Fischbach. He owned the unions. He owned the Commissioner.
We made plans to push farther south into the Bahamas, to troll the Ebb Tide off Mama Rhoda Rock just south of Chub Cay in the Tongue of the Ocean. Six-hundred-pound blue marlin were log-jammed into the Tongue of the Ocean. Schools of hundred-pound cubera snapper swam off Mama Rhoda. We’d fish for them using live lobster. We couldn’t miss.
Abe took his time with I.R., played with him. Wait, he whispered hoarsely. I’m gonna bury the old bastard.
Sexy Mama
“CAN YOU FEEL IT?” I ASKED A MIDDLE-AGED ELECTRICAL CONTRACTOR who was sitting next to me on the bridge of the Ebb Tide. I was seventeen and at the controls six miles north of Bimini. “Feel what?” The overweight New Yorker was seasick and miserable. I was annoyed that I had asked the question. This was my chance and I mustn’t be distracted now. The sick man covered his face with his arm. Father’s captain was drunk, sleeping it off below. For hours the ocean had been flat, lifeless. But now it was sizzling with breeze and current and something else. Something else. A half-dozen birds off the stern were jittering inches above the water.
Dad was talking with some other business friends in the cockpit. None of them cared about fishing. Dad had hoped to wow his customers with the new boat. I steered a little to the left. I called down, told them to get ready. We had not seen a fish all week, but I could feel that one was there. I was sweating all over, tapped into something I couldn’t explain. On the Gulf Stream there were clues everywhere you looked. But you had to notice. The nervousness of the birds was important, a cloud passing in front of the sun, any sea change might bring him up.
My dad’s friends were bored with trolling, dubious about my ability as a captain. My father had been laughing at all of their jokes, holding his belly. I worried whenever he did this. Despite the colostomy he was always hurting there.
There was a faint color change in the froth behind the boat, a ribbon of brown cutting across the wake. It settled behind the right rigger bait, a long brown log a couple of feet down. Then he rose a little and clipped the surface with his dorsal. Eventually my father’s friends could see his tall tail and dorsal so far apart there might have been two fish. The marlin moved sharply from one side of the bait to another like a big cat ready to pounce. He was enormous, eight or nine hundred pounds, I said later, but I really had no idea. Big. His heavy head lifted halfway out of the waves, swung his blade at the skipping mullet, missed. The men were dumbstruck. The unlikely size of the fish had paralyzed them. Again the marlin came out and missed the bait, threw water all over the ocean. I called from the bridge that someone should pick the rod up and pull the line out of the outrigger clip, feed the bait to the marlin. I was calling directions but no one was listening. The fish swung halfheartedly a few more times at the trolled bait and then lost interest. I could see his long brown shape falling farther and farther behind the boat. Below, my father was standing with a clenched fist. I couldn’t tell if he was upset about the fish getting away or was it something in their conversation, was the deal going bad? My father’s rage eclipsed all else. Maybe there wasn’t going to be a killing. I could still see the marlin fifty yards astern, arcing through the wake, swimming away.
Then an hour later at the dock, Dad looked content sipping his Scotch. The men had come to some agreement, Dad would tell me about it later. I was unbearably curious. But I figured he’d won. A captain came on board. One of the fancy boats was broken down. Maybe an electrical problem. No one on the island knew how to fix it. The captain had come for my father. Abe could barely walk, was feeling dizzy, but he said okay. I carried his ohmmeter and the captain helped Abe board the Rybovich. Dad’s friends also came along, sipping their drinks. Abe climbed through the hatch and bent his emaciated body between the bulkhead and the hot engine. He put a finger on his temple. Everyone hushed, Abe would get it going. Soon he was perched on the great diesel engine, pulling wires off, testing circuits with his meter. Then he tapped on a part and a few minutes later I packed the ohmmeter into its case. The crew helped him back to the Ebb Tide. They would be trolling for blue marlin in the morning.
The rocking and heat of the afternoon would have been enough to make a t
eenager horny. But there were often ladies on the Ebb Tide. One of Dad’s friends owned a big club in Lauderdale. Sometimes he brought three or four waitresses for a weekend. They took off the tops of their bathing suits and walked around the cockpit. Breasts jiggled past my face. I could smell them. I wanted to grab these girls and feel their bosoms on my face, hump them on the fighting chair. One of the girls had enormous dark nipples. She put her hand on my shoulder, asked me about marlin bait. I tried to describe rigging mackerel and bonefish. What were the rules when women walked around topless? I sat in the chair with an erection, smelling her, sweating. She looked at my lap and giggled.
Once I arrived on Bimini and Dad was with a girl only a couple of years older than me. She called Dad “Abe” as if they had known each other for years. She was beautiful, blonde, with a dream figure. When I looked at her I went hazy. Amazingly, while we trolled for marlin she read Dostoyevsky. Tremulously I ventured a few observations about Notes from the Underground. She was a recent graduate of Barnard. Imagine that, I also go to a Barnard, I said. She adjusted her scarf at my awkwardness. I was freewheeling with desire but she appeared not to notice. What were the rules about your father’s girlfriends?
This beautiful creature held Dad’s thin arm as he teetered down the dusty road for a J&B in the late afternoon. The idea of them fucking on the boat at night was astonishing, exciting, horrifying. I wondered if he was embarrassed about his colostomy. It didn’t occur to me that he paid for this smart, beautiful girl. At my age I only need to come once a month, Dad told me afterward, as though this explained everything. He had almost no voice left at all. To tell the truth I prefer nurses, he said, soothing himself with a Lucky. They know what to do—no hang-ups. I nodded.
After a day of marlin fishing on the Ebb Tide I was rife with desire. Hooked forward to the night, when the clubs came alive. When Dad was snoring in his forward bunk, I climbed out of the rack and headed up the road for the Calypso Club. I was a star at the Calypso, playing conga against a funky island sax, blistering them with riffs I had learned in New York. I wanted to seduce women with my rhythms. While I smiled at island ladies I used my middle finger to make the drum moan like Olatunji. Though my groin ached from strain I lifted the heavy conga with my legs, leaned back and pounded with elbows akimbo. I stuck my elbow in the middle of the skin like Armando Paraza. There was one night when I played like Auchee Lee. My sultry jungle rhythm had black bodies swaying and I sprayed the beat with bursts of flitty slaps. Something special was happening and my rhythm tightened like desire. Everything I had poured out when Sexy Mama came onstage in a cape. She was wild-eyed, threw the cape into the audience and leaped topless through a circle of flames. Then she spread her arms wide and shook her breasts while I punished the skins with rolling slaps, picked up the drum and thrilled them with a thunderous bass that shook the plywood walls. They were cheering while she made love to the beat and then looked my way for something new. My drumming hands were alive. Sweating, I slowed the rhythm to a crawl and Sexy Mama did the Bimini grind. I knew that later that night she’d be doing it with Bill Verity, the captain who caught me my first blue marlin.
It made Abe furious when natives told him they had seen Fred drumming at the Calypso. The congas were evil, decadent, black. He was sure the locals all smoked marijuana, tea, as he called it. Abe knew that in Boston Negroes smoked tea, walked around in a fog, they smelled. But on Bimini Abe favored them with his smiles and big tips and they loved him.
I thought incessantly about big black breasts. Walked the island in the afternoon sweating to get a glimpse of breasts. I knew where to look. In the shanties they barely bothered to dress. One lady with big ones cared for her pigs outside a broken shack. I would walk by to look at her. She didn’t mind. She bent over so that I could see better. One day she gestured for me to come in. As I walked across her narrow yard, one of the pigs, incredibly large and filthy, ran at me snorting. I jumped up on her buckling porch. I was scared stiff. I sat on a sofa inside that was torn here and there, with tufts of stuffing coming out. Beams of sunlight poured in from cracks in the wooden walls. She unbuckled my pants, began to knead my penis. Soon she was sucking on it. I was thinking of my father. What would he do to me. Outside I could hear the pigs squealing. Babies were yammering. Maybe hers. What if one of them came inside. Or her husband. After a while she lay down and put me inside her. I went on and on listening to the pigs. I couldn’t come. The big woman was heaving like a giant tuna on the deck. She was moaning and her breathing was furious. But I couldn’t concentrate. Then she stopped. “Baby, I have to catch my breath.” After a minute or two we started again. We went on and on, but I couldn’t. “Baby, you come yet?” she asked. “You come yet, honey?” It was hard. I was thinking of my father. What would he do to me. “I don’t have all day, honey.” A fat black lady with thick lips. My first love.
Something about the rocking ocean and searching for big fish opens a torrent of desire. One captain who fished for giant marlin in remote waters accommodated the inflamed libidos of his male customers by engaging an escort service. At fancy prices he ferried hookers in seaplanes a hundred miles from a home port to a small island where a sumptuous yacht was anchored. The women would be sunbathing nude on the top deck when the sportfishing boat arrived in the late afternoon after the day’s trolling for thousand-pounders.
Over the years I have noticed the erotic effect of fishing trips on my friends and guests. Couples become lusty, impatient for the evening. Teenage girls want to fish topless for groupers and yellowtail. They smear sunscreen on their firm breasts and bellies. With arched backs they pull up on their rods, their nipples become hard. They don’t mind if other boats cruise by for a look. They are fishing, restraints fall away. I am not sure why.
One time I was crossing the Gulf Stream with two friends on a small boat with a tuna tower. One of my buddies, a conservative and entirely proper man, was taking in the ocean sights from the tower, where he apparently believed that he could not be seen from below. At one point I leaned out over the gunwale to call up to him and saw that he was taking his pleasure while staring at a school of breaking yellowfin. Sex and tuna, go figure.
Raw Chicken Parts
FOR ALL THE YEARS WE OWNED THE EBB TIDE DAD KEPT A SHIP’S log with a blue marlin embossed on the cover. He listed every cruise and troll, each hookup and catch, every fuel fill, oil change, dinged propeller, every fishing trip with his boys, contractors and doctor friends. “Took on 135 gallons in Menemsha. Had a tuna on for 10 minutes off the #4 buoy.” Another entry: “Picking up the boys at 4PM. Filled crankcase oil. Nick came over Friday night,” referring to his favorite anesthesiologist. “Fished Saturday. Hooked a marlin. It got off. A great day.” The world depicted in the ship’s log was cozy and pleasant. Beyond the sight of land, pulling daisy chains of squid or running toward distant buoys, there were no treasons or treacheries. As Dad began to lose his voice his entries became increasingly verbose and cheerful, as though life were an endless cruise from hookups to landfalls. Dad’s vision of the world, his very essence changed when he boarded the Ebb Tide.
Between fishing trips Dad lived with Winnie in the Great Neck house. I think that they both believed that Bill and I would be coming back. Winnie cleaned and cleaned. She had a glazed expression now, like her shell-shocked son. She would ask my father, Where’s Fred and Bill? and he would tell her. Where’s the cats? Riverdale. Riverdale didn’t mean anything to Winnie but she nodded and resumed her chores. When they happened across one another again at the other end of the big house, Winnie would ask, Where’s Bill and the cats?
Dad traveled even more. Coming home from La Guardia at two A.M., he’d drop his fat briefcase on the living room floor. I’m beat, he’d say to no one. He shook his head. He was closing deals like crazy but there was no one here to tell. Dad had always made the plans. This wasn’t on the agenda.
Winnie was still ordering chickens and flanken from the kosher butcher. Dad didn’t care about ordering kosher me
at and ate out most of the time anyhow, but Winnie kept placing the orders, big orders for the family. He shook his head, threw out the meat. She cleaned the clean floors, vacuumed. Listened for Bill, her baby. Ordered more meat. She began stuffing the wings, thighs and livers into Dad’s drawer beside his carefully folded handkerchiefs. She had decided that raw chicken parts belonged there and wasn’t deterred when Dad roared at her to stop. He tried to cajole her, Winnie, get with it, put the chicken in the refridge. But she knew better.
Abe had to let her go.
I barely noticed when Winnie slipped out of my life. I was distracted when Dad called to tell me about the chicken parts and that he was considering selling the house. Why should he live in such a big place by himself? In retrospect, I realize that Dad was testing the water to see if I might offer to move back in with him. But I was having a bad time and his problems didn’t register. My stomach had been bothering me for weeks. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t study. It was burning. This was different from my episodes with diabetes and polio. I was losing weight. Every morning I weighed myself on the scale in Mother’s bathroom. I began chewing tablets and swigging chalky liquid. I felt weak and terrified. Withering away. I had bad gas. I had what Dad had. It was perfectly clear. I couldn’t sleep at night worrying about the bag I would need to wear. My love life was shot before it began. I couldn’t get my mother’s attention. She was doing performance art on the city streets with her mangy loser friends and making a movie with Taylor Mead, who would later become a regular in Andy Warhol movies. Mother was now sculpting outsized polyester eggs with strange figures showing from within, eggs from another world, and while Mead filmed, she buried them in excavations for new buildings all over Manhattan. She conceived of this as a protest against war and capitalism.
The Last Marlin Page 11