The Last Marlin

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  But the shark was content basking in the shadow of the skiff. Hanging off its flanks were two thick remora, four feet long. The hammerhead’s back was bowed from age, which made it disturbing to look at, menacing and decrepit at the same time. I think the shark would have sat beside the skiff for hours.

  Surely it occurred to my brother that he had pulled in the central character of Rogue Shark. After admiring the creature for a couple of minutes, Bill cut the line close to the heavy wire leader and connected the swivel clip to our stern rope. He had decided to take the shark back to Estes. I started the outboard and eased it ahead, signaling the boats to let us through.

  Of course there was no way we could manage this trip without the cooperation of the hammerhead. If it had decided to swim off, it would have pulled us under unless the cleat ripped from the gunwale. But the sixteen-foot shark followed us like a dog on a leash. It swam behind, slowing undulating its incredible tail.

  It was a bizarre sight, all right, Estes’s backwater skiff trolling a shark large enough for the movie Jaws, with an armada of boats following. We led the shark beneath the Snake Creek Bridge, where we had nearly swamped a few hours before. We waved to the snapper fishermen, who couldn’t believe their eyes. Then we idled along the island where the water was only three or four feet deep and the shark stirred up eddies of mud with its tail sweep.

  When we rounded the bend and could see Estes, the old man was in his crow’s nest above the shack. Every afternoon he went there to look for his precious boats. His little floating dock was crowded with tourists and fishermen from Bud and Mary’s Marina who had heard about the giant hammerhead on ship-to-shore.

  There must have been fifty people on the tiny dock when I came alongside. They looked like they were ready for a hammerhead barbecue. Someone tossed on board a stout line we could use as a tail rope. People were snapping pictures of the creature that sat on the mud bottom, barely moving except for its gills and an occasional sweep of its tail.

  Someone went for a rifle. I guess the idea was to shoot it in the head and hang it by its tail from a nearby tree. People from up and down the Keys would come around to see it and touch its head and rough hide.

  The next moment caught me by surprise. Bill went into his back pocket for his fishing pliers and then reached into the water. He cut the wire leader close to the shark’s jaw. For a few moments the hammerhead was idle, but then it got the idea, began to paddle its tail slowly. As the shark moved off into the bay, people were yabbering: Why would the kid let it go? That shark was a man-eater. Someone mentioned calling the police. Mr. Estes looked confused, as though time had passed him by. He never said a word to us about taking his skiff into the ocean.

  I recently joined Captain Peter Wright to fish off Hatteras, North Carolina. It was a February morning, very cold, and when we reached the Gulf Stream, twenty miles off the coast, steam was rising from the warm ocean as if we had entered an alien place. Almost immediately we began to see hammerhead sharks. They were swimming north in pods of three or four fish. After an hour or two it became apparent that we had fallen into the midst of a vast population of hammerheads, thousands of them. All around us there were babies as well as ancient creatures with broad heads and humped backs. The sharks were moving very slowly, as if they were all exhausted. We tried to interest them in our bait, but the sharks didn’t care about the fresh mossbunkers and mackerels—none of them would eat. During the past decade commercial fishing had decimated the shark population up and down the East Coast—I hadn’t seen a hammerhead in years. But for some reason it felt unsettling to come across so many. The entire day hammerheads appeared and disappeared in the mist like an army in retreat. In succeeding days we never saw another one.

  Stuffed Head Mounts

  MOTHER CONTINUED TO SPEND TIME WITH TONY, BUT SHE FELT crowded between him and her kids, accommodating, sneaking around. She wasn’t painting enough, which put her on edge. Sometimes she had Tony do chores almost like penance.

  Stella, you’re making me into one of those stuffed fish heads in Bill’s room, complained Fruscella one afternoon when Mother had him moving canvases around in the 14th Street studio.

  She tore into him: Tony, I’m drowning in your needs. You’re the same as Abe.

  Such words didn’t matter to Tony, who burrowed into drinking and shooting up. Finally, to get him out of the studio, she told him she wouldn’t make love to him until he left 14th Street forever.

  Deciding that Tony was like Abe gave her resolve. That’s how my mother’s mind worked. She wouldn’t leave him for robbing churches. In the weird and exasperating way Mother made connections, Tony was my father. She rammed this down my throat. Tony was Abe. Though she loathed his memory, Dad remained a locus for my mother, a way to access anger and spur herself out of indecision and torpor.

  Mother found Tony a room on the third floor of a dive on 49th Street and Eighth Avenue. Tony brought home a stray cat to keep him company. He called the cat Stella. Mother found this amusing. She bought food for Tony and occasionally spent the night. But she didn’t like to stay because the neighborhood was bleak and threatening. In the morning, when it was time to go, men were shooting up in the streets. One night he asked her not to leave and they argued. When she got up to go home Tony threw the cat out the window. Then he ran down the stairs to get her from the street. He came back crying, holding Stella in his arms. The cat was wild-eyed and wounded. Tony fell onto his knees pleading with Mother to stay with him.

  Mother saw Tony Fruscella less frequently but left bags of food for him. She kept retrieving his horn from the pawnshop on Third Avenue. As long as he had it, she believed he would survive. One time they arranged to meet in front of the shop so that she could give him back the horn. Right in front of the window there was a trash can and the cat was lying on top of the garbage with a noose around her neck. Mother decided Tony was sending her messages.

  She wouldn’t see him after this. Mother continued to bring food to the door of Tony’s hotel room. When she heard that he was living on the street, she sent him word that she would leave food in a brown bag at the southeast corner of Washington Square Park. Mother did this for months. Sometimes from around corners she would peek until he had picked up the bag of food. Tony set fires a couple of more times outside the front door of the 14th Street studio. He told neighbors and the police that he was Stella’s husband.

  Sometime after Mom stopped seeing Tony, when he was back on the street and barely surviving, his friend, the great bass player Red Mitchell, composed lyrics to Tony’s previously recorded version of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Mitchell’s words describing Tony’s art and painful life were taped over Fruscella’s gentle lilting solo. This collaboration over time is a masterpiece that cradles the listener in life’s sadness. Fruscella’s version had been recorded a decade before the words were added, when he was the toast of a few smoky Village nightclubs, experimenting, blowing, wearing slick clothes, when Fruscella was a giant, a young Miles, they said, doing dreamy junk and playing his breathy solos, singing through the horn, so vulnerable and yet untouchable, as if life could go on and on like this.

  In August 1969 Tony died in a friend’s apartment. The doctors determined it was a heart attack from too much drugs and drinking, but Mom believed Tony was just worn out and had stopped struggling. At the funeral Stella put Tony’s horn into the coffin with him, which angered some of his musician friends who felt it should have been given to a kid, but she insisted.

  Mother was the only one to go to the cemetery. In a distant life Tony had been a lieutenant in the army, and now he was honored with a military burial and a bugle playing taps. It is unlikely that the soldier musician knew that he was celebrating a great horn man who had played this lonely tune his whole life. Taps for the vegetable merchants on Seventh Avenue. Taps for Stella and the gravediggers. Afterward they gave my anarchist mother, of all people, the American flag.

  Betrayal

  I REMEMBER A NIGHT IN THE CITY WHEN DAD AND
I WERE walking on 48th Street, headed toward the Empress Restaurant to meet Leon Conn. They had formed a brief but profitable partnership during Abe’s last year in New York before he moved back to Cambridge. My father was angry that Leon owed him commissions from deals, but nothing was in writing. Dad wasn’t going to take a screwing from Leon and would set things straight at this dinner. I felt nervous about the meeting. I had always liked Leon and was surprised he was trying to stiff my father.

  It was only three blocks from the hotel to the Empress, and it was all my father could do to make it. We walked with my arm around his back and in the cold December air he made blowing sounds like a porpoise. Dad suddenly stopped and I almost knocked him down. He blew sharply, his handkerchief at the hole in his lower throat, and then pulled out his hardware, the stainless steel keepsake of his laryngectomy and permanent tracheotomy, and wiped it dry. A dozen times since the operation he had showed it to me and explained what gauge steel it was, exactly the same stuff he’d used to make special boxes able to withstand tremendous heat on Nike missile launching pads. If you didn’t know Dad was talking, you might have thought he was blowing bubbles. As we walked on, I squeezed his elbow and worried about his commissions. How would we ever get it straight? If there were no records his friend could easily lie. Maybe I would have to step in and confront Leon. I worried if I was up to this.

  Leon was a few minutes late. We were eating egg rolls when he came to the table with a big smile. During their brief association, he had learned the ropes from Dad and now was closing big jobs on his own. They shook hands warmly and immediately began talking about the lighting business in New York City. Or rather Dad’s ex-partner talked and Abe responded with blowing sounds, nods, smirks, occasionally a few salient words written on a little pad. Leon had always looked up to my father, and after reading one of Dad’s notes he turned to me, glowing. “No one’s got balls like your old man.”

  According to Leon, New York City was exploding with lighting jobs. The crown jewel was the World Trade Center, which was already in construction and would require the fixtures of twenty good-sized buildings. What a time this was in the industry. My father’s chin quivered slightly at the opportunity to land something larger than he had ever imagined. Why not go after it? Which contractor or commissioner was going to say no to him? I was so excited. I said to my father, half under my breath, Maybe you’ll decide to come back to New York for a little while. He raised an eyebrow in my direction, maybe, maybe. Dad ate a bite or two and then began to cough and had to clear his stainless tube. I was hoping he wouldn’t bring up the commissions and he didn’t. With so much opportunity in the air it would have been silly.

  After dinner he and I rode in a taxi to the Village, where I was living. On lower Sixth Avenue I helped him out of the cab while the driver waited to take him back to the Concord Hotel. I pointed my father toward the towering cranes and unlit spires of the World Trade Center, a darkened city crawling up into the clouds toward the moon. “Wow,” he said silently, taking in its mass and potential, quickly estimating square feet and the miles of fluorescents.

  After I graduated from Kenyon, when Dad still had a voice, there had been a period when he and I fought bitterly. Any path I chose was not only wrong, in his view, but devised to cause him pain and embarrassment in front of his business friends, particularly Alan Fischbach, who supplied parenting advice and political acumen as well as orders for fixtures and wiring troughs. I was incensed by my father’s incredulous eyes and tyrannical need to manage my life. If we had dinner and I asked about the boat or his sister, his voice would drip with sarcasm or suspicion, and if I happened to blunder the conversation into my antiwar politics, my choice of wife or struggle to become a writer, we were immediately into a bloodbath of words and silences. With the last scratches of a voice, Dad would correctly point out that I was yelling him down.

  After his laryngectomy we no longer argued. This terrible storm had swept past, and he and I were into uncharted but peaceful waters. It wasn’t difficult to learn to read Dad’s lips and to understand his impassioned guttural sounds. The loudness and cadence of his taps on a glass or tabletop gave dramatic nuance to his appeals and arguments. Assessing the world in our private language, I was accepted as a trusted adviser, nearly an equal. Perhaps this was because I had a knack for anticipating his ideas and even creating some of them. It was a great relief for him to be able to communicate without straining, and Dad had never been more gentle or open with me. I loved my visits to Cambridge. When we were alone late at night in the house, he sipped vodka and shared his big ideas. Sure, Lee Products was small-time, but there was room on the property to double the size of the shop. Dad would take out a yellow pad and sketch the factory with an additional twelve thousand square feet. Maybe we needed five thousand feet more, I suggested boldly, and he tapped his finger on his temple and mouthed the words, You’re right, good idea. All of a sudden I was a big cheese like him. Dad showed me where we would place the new shipping department, the automated spray booth and the degreasing tank. He nodded at my suggestions. Soon enough we would sell the shop and move into a factory three times as large. I agreed heartily. Our fantasy swelled by the minute. It wouldn’t take long before we’d have a big factory like Globe. Maybe bigger. Then I made myself a corned beef sandwich while Dad waited patiently and sipped from his glass.

  The sagging, crumbling Fayette Street house in Cambridge creaked with my father’s footsteps. Clues of my childhood hung on the walls or lay carefully organized in his files and drawers. I discovered my third-grade report card signed neatly by Abe Waitzkin, and there was a photograph of him and Mom with a couple of contractors at the Copacabana. Mother was swaying to the strains of the Xavier Cugat Orchestra. Dad was smiling and I could tell that he had the contractors in the palm of his hand.

  Our disagreements were ancient history, Dad would say, and now he bragged to his sister or Jerry, the Lee Products shop foreman, that Freddy had written this article or story. He would ask respectfully about Bonnie and was content to leave my radical politics alone. During my frequent trips to Cambridge I was surprised at how easy it was to step away from my New York life and to fall within the sway of Abe’s optimism and vision of the future. The truth was, in the absence of his disapproval, my life choices seemed to lack luster and backbone, while Dad’s business dreams were brimming with pizzazz and fun. We were drifting into a brief and unusual partnership. Perhaps he had been grooming me all along for this.

  Dad quickly decided that returning to New York was a waste of his time, although I don’t think he was ever seriously tempted. He was building something special in Boston, he said, with the same mesmerizing confidence I remembered from Great Neck weekends when he had described how he’d wrested the Aqueduct Race Track job away from his juggernaut competitors, Lightolier and Westinghouse. Dad tapped his glass on the kitchen table for emphasis. Lee Products was his company and no one could ever take it away from him. No one. This was more important in the long run than all the New York jobs.

  Fuck the World Trade Center. Fuck Leon’s commissions. I can imagine him carefully forming the words to his sister Celia when I was back in New York and she visited him late at night with a pint of vanilla ice cream, delicious and soothing for his sore throat. Cele would titter at his ballsy language. Dad always made a nice face as the ice cream went down.

  While the Blum family slept upstairs Abe shared his great plans with Cele in the dilapidated kitchen. After ice cream there was coffee at midnight, and Dad regaled her with stories about Alan Fischbach and the Commissioner. She was thrilled by his plots and access to power far beyond the reach of her husband, who did the pricing for small orders at Lee Products. For years there had been the faintly illicit fantasy that she would be a part of Abe’s glorious ride to the top. And though she was a caring wife, Cele’s love for her brother was so powerful and obvious that it created darkness in Lennie and her eldest son Howie who were coming to abhor Abe’s bruising business style.

&nb
sp; When Abe was sleepy from his pill she walked him to his room and they talked about business until he was snoring. Dad slept in the green bed from the Great Neck house, right beside Mom’s, though the room was sorely cramped with two beds and the lovely matching dresser with wide swinging doors where Winnie had faithfully placed his starched shirts, socks and folded handkerchiefs. The setup suggested that he and Mom could put it back together in a minute. Why not? he once defiantly mouthed to me. And I had no answer.

  Cele and Lennie’s bedroom was directly above Dad’s. Cele always said that living right on top of Abe she would be able to hear him if there was any problem, but one afternoon, a week or ten days after the laryngectomy, Dad was locked out of his apartment and climbed the stairs to her place to get in. Abe had knocked on the door and window but couldn’t get his sister’s attention at the other end of the house. He walked to the back of the three-story house but he couldn’t get into the outside door that led up the stairs to her kitchen. He couldn’t call. He had to stand outside in the cold without gloves for an hour. When she found him out there with his nose dripping, Cele nearly burst into tears. Abe didn’t have a voice. How could her brother sell the line without a voice?

  Even Cele didn’t fully understand the power of his fantasy. My father had no interest in pitching the Lee Products line to little distributors in Bangor and Manchester. With or without a voice he intended to close big deals, to get back on top. I would think how hard it was for Dad to carry the little company on his back, living in meager circumstances while trying to build this mite into something he could feel proud about over drinks with his contractor buddies in Vegas or San Juan. While Dad planned bold moves down the line, his father and brother-in-law worried about paying the phone and electric bills and lobbed potshots from the sidelines. They couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Sammy Davis, Jr., stopping by Abe’s table for a drink. Pop and Lennie wanted to run Lee Products like a corner grocery store. No mortgages or loans for adding space or new machines. No risks. Dad’s father Joe would complain to his friend, Mr. Glassman from the synagogue, that Abe went to fancy restaurants or Abe didn’t get into the shop until eleven A.M. and then he had a glass in his hand. Cele would try to convince her dad that with Abe’s contacts he didn’t need to get in early to do his selling, but Pop smirked and continued reporting Abe’s sins to Mr. Glassman. Dad swallowed his rage. What could he say? It was not right to be furious at his sick eighty-year-old father.