The Last Marlin

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  One afternoon my father was sitting in the silent kitchen across from Pop’s room on the first floor, wearing shorts and a sleeveless undershirt, pitiably thin—the little he ate ran right through his remaining few feet of intestine. When the doorbell rang, Dad was unwrapping a pound of lean corned beef to make a sandwich. Pop invited Mr. Glassman inside. Mr. Glassman had been walking past on his way home from the synagogue. He was nearly a hundred years old and though he had lost much of his height, his eyes were bright and he could still shuffle along to the synagogue each day. Pop was bitter because he was no longer strong enough to walk to services and had to beg a ride from Cele or one of the kids. Before Mr. Glassman had taken off his coat, Pop began griping about the meat on the table. Abe was always ordering a pound of lean corned beef, sometimes more, when there was already corned beef in the refrigerator, one or two opened packages. Take a look, he said to Mr. Glassman. Pop went into the fridge and pulled out stiff packages of corned beef. Why didn’t Abe worry about wasting money? How was he brought up? My father was sitting there in his undershirt smearing mustard on rye bread, not speaking. Now Mr. Glassman and Pop began discussing the synagogue. There were only a few members still alive. An army of dead behind them. Mr. Glassman was concerned about the big bronze sign in the anteroom of the temple with its long list of members past and present. All the deceased members had small illuminated bulbs next to their names. The bulbs were burning out all the time, which made it hard to discern the living from the dead. There was no money in the account for so many bulbs. If money couldn’t be raised, Mr. Glassman would have to pay for them himself. It was a disturbing problem.

  Abe was into a slow burn. The family was getting in his way. Even without a voice he could close bigger deals than they could imagine. Lennie and Pop were happy to sell three panel boxes at a time. What was wrong with them? Abe still had his connections. In a few weeks he and Alan Fischbach would be taking the Ebb Tide to Bimini. Fischbach was the answer. But Pop and Lennie didn’t want Fischbach jobs. Abe smirked, but he didn’t try to speak. Now Joe was complaining to Mr. Glassman about cigarette smoke in the apartment. Who do they think they are anyway? They’d come his way or Abe would break them. Joe was bitterly sniffing the air while Dad took a bite of his meat. Abe had given up Luckies, switched to Kent, with no taste. Wasn’t that enough?

  When he had his strength back from the laryngectomy, Abe was again making monthly trips to New York to see Alan Fischbach, who gave him orders for wiring troughs and panel boxes. Abe also closed a few side deals with contractors for lighting jobs just to prove he still could. He walked into familiar offices with a bratty smile and made his pitch with his finger on the hole in his throat. Dad could wrap up an order when he was too weak and dizzy to stand.

  The Fischbach jobs were not near the megasized orders of the Globe days, but they were very large by Lee Products standards. Pop and Lennie were suspicious of these orders, much as I.R. had resisted Dad’s fluorescent jobs ten years earlier. Pop and Lennie believed Lee Products should have many customers. They wanted salesmen on the road servicing distributors throughout New England and to build inventory in the shop so that customers could be serviced quickly. This was impossible because Abe had the plant’s resources and machinery tied up manufacturing Fischbach deals.

  Joe Waitzkin, who was now incontinent and increasingly bitter about his own future, referred to his voiceless son as “the mechanic.” Joe was blind to the glitz and glamour of Fischbach and fumed that despite Abe’s engineering prowess, he would take these big jobs without considering the technology or resources needed to manufacture them, or even if the job was profitable. His son was driven to close the deal regardless of the price.

  It was not easy for Cele to reconcile her brother’s grand schemes with her father’s brutal critiques and Lennie’s brooding jealousy. By now Dad was no longer concealing his scorn for Lennie. My visits to Cambridge allowed Cele respite from tense family dinners in front of the counter rotisserie. Dad and I usually dined out in pricey spots around Boston compliments of Lee Products. We talked business and planned our fishing trips.

  Within months of Abe’s laryngectomy Lennie suffered a heart attack, and while he recuperated at home, his eldest son Howie moved up from the factory to the office. Lennie had grown numb to Abe’s excesses in the shop, but Howie experienced his uncle’s anger with fresh eyes. Abe’s lashing style was all the more unnerving for his incomprehensible sounds and brutal silences. Howie was dumbfounded by his uncle’s principal attitude that everyone was trying to screw him and he was going to screw them back. Abe fired workers because he suspected they were talking behind his back. He cursed Louie the tool and die maker each time he came into Lee Products with a price, whatever it was, and they fought like cats. Abe pounded the table in frustration and broke pencils writing his damning notes.

  Suspicions and vendettas gave Dad resolve to pull on his socks in the morning. He might have sat in a chair looking out the window at the bleak alley between row houses, but fury launched him into fancy offices with his guts in tangles and his vocal cords cut out. My mangled, emaciated father could be a fearsome visage. Fuck ’em, he’d say, spittle bobbing on his lower lip. He’d fire them all, burn the shop down if he didn’t get his way. Who was going to stop him? Lennie? Howie? They were mice. Let them carp on about the line. Abe thrived on their resistance and he stuffed Fischbach down their throats. But then he had periods of sweetness, hosting grand corn beef and pastrami lunches in the office, joking with the men; and even while he only took a few bites himself, he loved watching the guys enjoy the food; such camaraderie all but erased the bad taste. Everyone prayed for this Abe to show up at work the next morning.

  Unlike his father, Howie would occasionally criticize his uncle and they had terrific blowups. After Howie gave himself a twenty-dollar-a-week raise, my father wouldn’t speak with him for a full year. Howie trembled with anger when he walked past my father. Spurred by outrage, my cousin learned the business and became the top inside guy the company needed, figuring out innumerable manufacturing shortcuts; meanwhile the little office crackled with tension and even in the Fayette Street house Howie and Abe no longer spoke or looked at one another.

  The atmosphere in Cambridge grew even more incendiary after my father hired Diran Bagdasarian. He was the sales manager of a car dealership, a large, cheerful man with bushy black eyebrows who knew how to lean on a customer and when to back off. Diran was a crackerjack car salesman, but Abe lured him from Pontiacs with the promise of big bucks in the box business, the opportunity to break from tawdriness and mediocrity into the big time.

  Abe forced Diran’s appointment as sales manager of Lee Products, arguing that the new man would regularly service accounts up and down New England and establish relationships with new distributors. From the start the Blums were suspicious about the arrangement, which obligated the company to pay him commissions on all company sales. Diran was clearly Abe’s guy, an Armenian no less, and he would be sharing from a very small pie. Every month Howie or Lennie gave him a list of distributors to visit. Diran neatly filed the paper in his briefcase and drove with Abe to the Pancake House for breakfast.

  In fact Abe needed Diran to be his voice, an ally against the Blums, and to drive him around, as Dad was usually wobbly by the afternoon from drinking. Like me Diran had a knack for climbing into Abe’s skin. He could read Dad’s lips and eventually his mind. Diran learned how to move around his friend’s rage, and he was able to soothe my father as no one else except possibly Cele. It was a relief that Dad had such a buddy. They would often call me with the newest gossip about wiring trough jobs. I thought of us as a little team.

  Once a month Diran drove Abe to New York to see Fischbach. He did Abe’s talking while my father sat patiently, nodding, pointing his forefinger, sipping from his glass. Diran and Abe shared the same hotel room and stayed up late into the night talking business and considering the future. Diran believed that Abe’s New York deals were more important than th
eir dollar amounts. He willingly set aside his own needs and family time to chase Abe’s vision to the boat, to Fischbach, to one of Dad’s steak joints on Second Avenue where lighting salesmen hobnobbed or to hunt down Abe’s lost commissions from whoever was pulling a fast one. Diran had decided that this path would eventually lead them both to the exalted place where Dad had once lived before returning to Boston.

  I am convinced that Diran’s fierce commitment was not about money. He fell in love with my father, as many of us did. Abe’s gentleness and empathy were astonishing, the other side of the great storm, mind you, and he could be the truest friend of a lifetime, though it was a little strange that this Abe never held the other one accountable. Diran wanted to be with Abe all the time. He drove my father through rainstorms and blizzards while Dad sipped his drink. He would help my father inside the creaky house and put him into his bed. With his size Diran could easily lift Abe whenever it was required. My father was so appreciative and his sleepy expression was peaceful and childlike.

  Traveling to service the New England accounts seemed trivial to Diran, and Dad was pleased that his friend didn’t want to go. They often spent the day doing projects on the Ebb Tide, which was berthed at the Boston Harbor Marina. Fuck them, said Abe with his what-are-they-gonna-do-about-it grin.

  Into this mixmaster of love and impending war came Bonnie and I with my first boat. Dad had arranged a bargain-basement price for my twenty-foot center-console Sea Craft from the owner of the company, who was a fishing crony from Bimini. Dad recognized that I needed to captain my own ship and never made an argument, which was a great relief. Indeed, his sudden openness to my independence, an unexpected turn of plot, drew me to him, and his caring and reasonable manner seemed to prove the case against my carping and parochial Boston relatives.

  Bonnie and I were in Boston the day the Sea Craft arrived on a trailer in front of the Lee Products factory. She had a deep vee bottom and was creamy white with slick racy lines. Soon enough we’d be chasing down marlin off the north end of Bimini in this little fish boat that we also called the Ebb Tide. But first she needed setting up. The boat had to be wired bow to stern for running lights, bilge pumps, radios and such. Dad came up with clever design ideas and he pillaged from the shop’s workbench for the tools to put into a little brown box tailored for the size of the craft as well as my limited mechanical skills—it would bail me out of ocean jams for many years. He directed Diran to take three men from the shop and they happily ambled outside the dark, noisy factory and went to work on this lovely boat in the sunny parking lot. Dad came by every few hours to check on progress.

  Since returning to Boston Abe had made a habit of pulling men from the factory to work on the big Ebb Tide whenever he saw the need. In Dad’s view his boat brought class and cachet to the business and allowed him to entertain high rollers with cocktails off the Boston lightship or trolling the rip west of Provincetown. But Joe Waitzkin and the Blums were livid whenever Abe took one-third of the Lee Products workforce to clean the Ebb Tide’s teak deck or paint her tuna tower or dock boxes. Manufacturing and shipping came to a near halt until the men were back inside the shop degreasing and painting. Then Abe would fly off the handle when they were late delivering boxes to Fischbach.

  During our visit Cele tried to pad her way around her brother’s audacity. She congratulated us on the new boat and cooked hearty meals for me and Bonnie, which we ate with our cousins, Sereda and Barry. Cele wanted the atmosphere in Fayette Street to be cozy and sharing, full of family and hugs. That was my aunt’s character, but she was upset about Abe’s style of business and easy manner with her money. She had been thinking her father’s way: maybe Abe was a sucker taking his customers to clubs and fancy restaurants, always grabbing the check. And far worse, whenever Abe had to repair the generator on the Ebb Tide or fill her four-hundred-gallon gas tanks or pick up pricey odds and ends for Freddy’s little Ebb Tide, he wrote a Lee Products check without calculating if the remaining balance was sufficient to cover the payroll and the steel delivery; or if she and Lennie minded that he spent their money. When Abe had decided that his boat needed more power he had replaced his gasoline engines with diesels that cost the company more than forty thousand dollars. This had created a cash flow crisis that lasted a year and a half. Cele had suffered the anger and frustration of Lennie and her father and had tried to smooth things over.

  But now, while Dad did most of his late-night conniving with Diran or Freddy if he was in town, she felt scorned and shut out. Maybe Abe wasn’t worrying about her future anymore. What kind of outrageous promises had her brother made to Diran? Abe had it in for Lennie and Howie, that was for sure. Were Abe and Diran pulling a fast one? Having doubts about Abe were dizzying to my aunt, who had long revered her brother and was devoted to his physical care. But she was seething about Diran taking Lee money while kicking mud in their faces, ordering workers into Abe’s boats and walking around the shop like the king of Egypt.

  The Flying Gaff

  DAD LOANED US HIS BIG BUICK AND BONNIE AND I TRAILERED THE little Ebb Tide south. We almost lost her on 1-95 thirty miles north of Lauderdale when the trailer jackknifed. We drove the last miles feeling very shaky. We bought bags and bags of groceries along with hundreds of pounds of horse ballyhoo, split tail mullet and stiff-brined mackerel, which were the best blue marlin baits of all. We were going for marlin that summer, on our own, without a forty-foot sportfishing boat or captain or even my brother. Bill wouldn’t come fishing with me anymore, although the meaning and sadness of this had not yet fully registered. It was just the two of us. Bonnie was a very small young woman with little experience on the water. I had my fantasies about being a big-time marlin skipper, but this was the moment of actually stepping into the wild.

  As we shopped in the grocery packed with tanned housewives in golf shorts and tennis skirts, I confided in my young wife that what concerned me most about the trip to the Bahamas was the hump. That was what the captains called the middle of the Gulf Stream when the wind was blowing out of the north, against the current, and the seas gathered into steep, menacing waves that could easily swamp a little boat, even a boat like the big Ebb Tide. I knew stories about captains riding tuna towers who had lost their boats from under them between Lauderdale and Bimini.

  It was her fear of dying on the ocean that first awakened Bonnie to the relevant moral issues. Do you think we should be killing fish for sport or even hurting them with big hooks? she asked as we pulled up to a checkout girl who looked unhappy about our stacked carts. I don’t think so, Bonnie mused. A lady behind us looked at me with reproach.

  I should never have told Bonnie about the hump. It was a name, lumpen and vulgar, that constellated her fears and brought to her mind mythological boiling seas battering our little boat to smithereens, big ocean sharks feasting on our floating, bloated remains. What’s the point of dying on the hump or drowning while trying to kill a few poor fish? she asked me as we struggled with our four carts of groceries into the sweltering parking lot of the Winn-Dixie.

  The night before we made the first crossing, her fears had inflamed my own and I couldn’t sleep at all worrying about big seas and my own checkered history as a captain. I was sweating in bed and my chest felt tight. Our radio did not have more than a ten-mile range and the crossing was better than sixty. I knew that I must keep my bow into the seas, but our boat was too small for big head seas, and we’d be too low in the water with our heavy load of supplies and bait. Maybe we’d die on this first crossing, and in my last minutes struggling to hold my wife afloat, I’d feel guilty and stupid. I tried to recall Hemingway’s inspired writing about marlin and broadbills, but I could only remember his admonitions about going to sea in a small boat.

  On the sturdy little craft set up cleverly by my dad, I steered a compass course of 124 degrees for Bimini, more or less the same open ocean faced by Ernest Hemingway three decades earlier on his disastrous first attempt to visit the island. Hemingway and his friends, includi
ng John Dos Passos, were still close to the Florida side when a shark hit Hemingway’s trolled bait. After he fought the shark to the transom, he gaffed it and then began putting bullets into it from a pistol he carried on board. The twisting shark broke the gaff handle and Hemingway lost his balance and shot himself through both thighs. While the great author bled on the deck and vomited into a bucket, crew members turned back for Florida.

  A week later, lured by tales of gigantic marlin off the Bimini Islands, the writer was headed back across the Stream and would soon make pioneering catches of bluefin tuna and marlin, establishing Bimini as the world’s greatest fishing ground. Hemingway had also been apprehensive about crossing the hump, which I found reassuring; except that he never made the trip in a boat as small as ours, and whenever he traveled from Florida on his thirty-eight-foot Wheeler he brought along a burly, experienced crew.

  When we left the jetties at Port Everglades, the ocean was nearly flat, about what you would expect to find trolling for bass in Manhasset Bay on a calm spring evening, and we looked out nervously for a wall of fierce water ahead. We cruised past water skiers and head boats with anglers dropping silversides and globs of conch for grouper and snapper. I waved to them. They could see Dad’s fine rods and reels sitting smartly in my rod holders. These weekend fishermen could tell we were serious marlin hunters. Maybe they were right. When you are young big risks seem negotiable and you get rare chances to become who you want to be. I was reassured by the ocean’s kindly movements and the fresh soft smells I had loved since childhood. As the shoreline behind us gradually became indistinct and hazy, I steered a wandering course looking at schools of breaking tunas and promising weed lines or color changes on the water. I was invigorated by working seabirds and the slip of our clean hull through the peaceful ocean. I kept returning to the same heading on the compass without thinking about the southerly breeze and the current that was pushing us north at three and a half knots. I put a couple of baits over for a short time but then decided to return to cruising speed so that we would arrive at the island before dark. It was a beautiful clear afternoon and I felt the wonder of so much open blue water ahead of me, so much adventure ahead. I wanted the trip to go on and on.