The Last Marlin

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  Cele and Lennie were afraid of being crushed by this giant and they retained a firm equally costly and prestigious. Two monster firms. Either of them might have defended a major suit against a massive public corporation or represented a Kennedy. Teams of sage partners and whiz-smart interns rolled up their sleeves and began the lengthy litigation over Lee Products.

  It was a game. That’s how I thought of my business life with Dad, all the big plans, the action and drama—a testing ground with a lifetime of second chances. For a moment the game had gotten away from us. It was very close. Anyone might have made a reasonable phone call. Cele was wretched in her isolation from her brother, guilt-ridden about not giving him back the shares that were indisputably his. But there was so much anger and passion for the fight. Dad had once closed the biggest deals in the city and now Lee Products was his domain. Cele was defending bravely against a massive hostile takeover. None of us ever thought we were battling over a few ruined machines and a crumbling building.

  I knew we’d win. I encouraged Dad to leave for Florida, where he would be living with his friends. I would watch over the lawsuit against Cele and my cousins. I’d handle it. We planned to visit in Florida and take the Ebb Tide to the Bahamas.

  The Last Marlin

  FROM OFFSHORE, BIMINI FIRST APPEARS LIKE A MISTAKE—A FEW fuzzy treetops planted in the expanse of choppy ocean. When I blink, this trace of land is gone and I wonder if I’ve imagined it, which is sometimes the case. Eventually I can make out a dash of sand and the roofs of a few homes.

  In fact, the island is only a hundred sandy yards across, a tenuous place. A small tidal wave could easily obliterate the entire tiny civilization of fifteen hundred poor souls with their hopes and sadnesses, state-of-the-art satellite dishes nailed onto woeful shaky shacks, glistening new washing machines standing on rotting porches; everywhere there are legacies of the drug trade, a minifleet of Camrys and pickups smoothly gathering speed for the three-mile trip to the north or south, an island of teenage boys without dreams selling crack to smaller boys, of beached fishermen dreaming of fleets of motor scooters and golf carts, a single wave could wash it all onto the flats with the barracudas, bonefish and hammerheads.

  But this is the perspective of an outsider and after only a few days I am drawn into this place. The water is clear and warm, the same striation of colors that moved me so as a teenager, the same night air and sandy streets, the inside channel peaceful and evocative, as if all of this has been waiting for me. The bonefishermen search the flats for muds and tails. The girls are still young and flirtatious. I become lost in time. Bimini cured my father again and again, kept him alive and selling. It keeps me alive. Bimini memories are still sensuous and deepened by evening breezes and the deep sea.

  Somehow it makes perfect sense that Eric Sawyer on the hill has long conversations with his grandfather, who has been dead now for thirty years. They argue over small details. At night Hemingway’s old skipper dreams of a huge marlin rising behind his boat as it trolls down the Queens Highway. While Eric prepares for the strike his outriggers tangle in palm trees and the huge fish lunges past motor scooters and golf carts trying to get at the skipping bait. Eric loses his fish again and again. “Waitzkin, there are a thousand ways to lose a marlin,” he explains to me philosophically.

  I am thinking of my father and Craig. I am hungry for them.

  While I tended to my father’s legal affairs, my brother arrived at the weighty decision to construct a life-sized model of the jaw of an eighty-foot Carcharodon megalodon. It incensed him that the Carcharodon megalodon jaw at the Museum of Natural History was constructed inaccurately, using teeth of the same size instead of larger, hand-sized ones in front, with progressively smaller teeth toward the back of the jaw. Bill had discussed this terrible blunder with an ichthyologist at the museum and mentioned an expedition he was planning to South Carolina to search for giant shark teeth to make a perfect jaw. I could imagine my brother’s bourbon-slurred words as he expressed his outrage about the museum’s shoddy work.

  Bill traveled to South Carolina and moved in with a hippie couple who lived near the marshlands. There was much marijuana and night partying but on most days my brother pulled on his hip boots and trudged into the bog searching for giant fossilized shark teeth, exhausting work, particularly with Bill’s arthritis, which made bending painful. He spent weeks there and returned to the city with hundreds of teeth, although only a half-dozen were exactly right for the mammoth jaw. There would need to be several more trips. Bill sorted the teeth by size, stored them in jars and showed them to his friends. They were his treasure.

  I tried to explain to Bill what was going on between Dad and his sister and that our father was sick and depressed. Only now had it become clear to me that Dad had little money and his only valuable asset was the boat. If he lost the case, how would he survive? It was not possible for him to continue living in the viperous Cambridge atmosphere where he began drinking before breakfast. Dad was now our responsibility, I said to my brother collegially, trying to enlist his support but feeling his attention drift. With Dad in trouble conversations with Bill were even more exasperating. My brother’s life played out in front of him like a Broadway musical. When he finished constructing the jaw, and it was in place in the museum, he intended to move to Morocco and settle down overlooking the Mediterranean attended by loyal servants. Occasionally he would return to the States for Mother’s gallery openings. And perhaps someday he might come back to live in Great Neck. Dad was not in Bill’s plans. He wanted me to understand this.

  On an inspiration I called my aunt on the phone and urged her to return my father’s shares of Lee Products, just give back what you know is his, Cele. Then we could forget the lawyers and all the anger would soon disappear. My aunt’s voice was cheerful but unyielding. I could not believe that she would say no. Then I had this terrific idea and I just spoke it to my aunt. If you persist in this, someone is going to die, Cele. I let this hang dramatically. She knew what I meant, my father or her husband Lennie. It was such a preposterous thing to say, but in my youthful miasma I believed my aunt would shudder and buckle. Instead she closed like a fist around my visionary prattle. Her fury made me righteous. I got off the phone with her and called the lawyers, talked strategy, felt like a big shot. Like Abe.

  Several weeks after Dad left for Florida I heard from his friend Bob, who owned the house in Fort Lauderdale where my father stayed and tied up his boat. My father had been sick with cramps for a week. Food wouldn’t pass through him. Abe had told Bob that he needed a shot but they couldn’t find a doctor to come over to the house and give him one. Abe drank more and more but the cramps wouldn’t ease up. He vomited green foam. Finally Bob had taken Abe to the Holy Cross Hospital and a few hours later Dad was operated on for an intestinal blockage.

  I had flown to Florida many times and always with the expectation of fishing or sitting on a veranda by the water with my father sipping a drink and talking about his deals. In Florida we usually food-shopped for the boat, bought bait, Japanese feathers, line and such, got ready to leave for Bimini. There was terrific excitement. Flying with Bonnie to Fort Lauderdale I found it hard to escape this mind-set. My life with him moved ahead like a wave.

  Sitting up in the hospital bed with his hair neatly brushed, Dad looked great, as if he were expecting a customer. He gave me a wave and grinned at his intravenous tubes. No big deal, he’d had much worse than this. I read his lips and the meticulous movements of his hands, like a conductor’s, lingering on a point or raising its emphasis. We were soon into our own world of business deals and great plans. He was jaunty and ready to go. I loved it that none of the doctors and nurses who busied themselves about his bedside had any idea what we were talking about. I told him that my writing was going terrifically, although I was hardly writing at all. Dad expected to get out of the hospital soon and go back to Bob’s house. Fischbach was coming down. He needed to have work done on the diesels before he could leave for the isla
nds.

  When the phone rang it was Cele. She had learned about Dad’s surgery from his friend Bob. I pointed to the receiver and Dad shook his head, mouthed the words, No way, and then, I want the goddamned shares back. Then we’ll talk. This was vintage Abe Waitzkin, tightening the screws, using sickbed leverage.

  Bonnie and I went out to dinner at the Raindancer Steak House on Commercial Boulevard, Dad’s favorite restaurant. We stayed in the forward bunks of the Ebb Tide. We made love and she assured me that my pains weren’t cancer or colitis, just a tight stomach.

  The next day in the hospital Dad was living in another place and time. He was staring up at the ceiling with a perturbed expression. He reached up with his hand and turned something. Than he put his finger on his temple and thought deeply.

  What’s he doing? asked the nurse.

  He was trying to install the electric garage door in the Great Neck house. It wouldn’t go up or down. I recalled this cold winter afternoon very well. I had been there holding his tools while he figured out the answer. Dad tightened something with a screwdriver. The wiring diagram was all wrong and he was disgusted. Then he began testing wires with his ohmmeter. A few days later Dad had gone into the hospital for his colostomy.

  When I called him back Dad looked at me suspiciously, his face dark as though someone had crossed him. All morning he had been vomiting green bile. The doctor said that it was only a question of time before his digestion kicked back in, not to worry.

  Later that evening Dad was standing in a corner of his hospital room. No one was around and it was almost dusk. Soon they would roll in his dinner. He had to move quickly or he would be discovered. He was late for his flight but he couldn’t find his pants or his watch with his name printed above the leaping sailfish painted on the dial. And then he had to go to the toilet, he had to go terrible. But he couldn’t find the bathroom. The nurse found him standing with his intravenous wires pulled out of his arm, an emaciated man with a hand covering his wound, his excrement looking like corn flakes coming out from between his fingers. It was a sweet smell, not unpleasant.

  What are you doing, standing there, she asked him. You’ve pulled out your wires.

  I have to take a crap, he mouthed the words. I have to go terrible.

  Are you hungry, sweetheart? she asked without looking at what he was saying. We’ll take care of that. Tonight we have pot roast and mashed potatoes. You just climb back into bed.

  I have to take a goddamned crap. I have to go bad.

  Don’t you pull out your wires again. You hear me. Or I’ll have to tie you down.

  He was shaking his head, no, no, no. I gotta go real bad. I gotta go something terrible. She wasn’t listening to him and he was disgusted.

  The young doctor explained that Dad was shaking like a leaf from alcohol withdrawal and his blood chemistry was off. As soon as corrections were made, he would be back to his old self. The doctor was cheerful and I felt assured. Except now I wanted to ask him about the pains in my stomach. But I was too embarrassed to mention it. I was terrified by the traffic of medical apparatus and doctors. As if I had pressing business I rushed from Dad’s room whenever a nurse came to change his dressing. I was impelled by the superstition that I wouldn’t survive if I saw my father’s wounds and blood.

  After ten days Bonnie went back to her job in New York. My brother Bill arrived flushed with the drama and solemnity of Dad’s grave illness and imminent passing. Bill felt empowered by formal occasions. I would look at my brother’s face for a sign of affection for his father, something he’d been hiding or saving for the right moment, but this wasn’t it. After a week Bill grew restless waiting and returned to New York.

  Cele kept calling the hospital almost every day. I would explain that Dad was too tired to come to the phone, but she knew that Abe wouldn’t speak to her. And I knew the pain it caused her. This was my father’s plan for winning. I never told her about the times he was living in another world. I kept hoping that she would send the papers down to Florida and Dad would get better.

  There were days when Dad was so far away I feared he would never make it back. His eyes raced around the room and he reported fires burning outside the window. He smiled and then fell into despair, witnessed terrible things. A world of pain and success whirled by him. He persuaded his customers. Eventually he grew calm and sleepy, childlike. Some afternoons he worked on the garage door or his diesels. I waited for him to come back.

  I waited for two months. There was hardly anything left of Dad. Food poured through him like an open pipe. I stayed on the Ebb Tide and ate steak in the Raindancer, believing it would help. Occasionally, late at night, he would surprise me with a phone call, tap with his fingernail on the receiver. Things were going good or he was feeling sleepy. These taps revived my optimism. Somehow he lived.

  And there were days when my father’s clarity was startling. He’d smile at me and ask about the legal case against Cele and Lennie. He made sharp suggestions. Again he was calling the shots, and I believed that he would get us out of this mess. Dad was concerned about the dwindling balance in his checkbook and suggested that maybe we would have to let the boat go. This was reasonable, as boat expenses were bleeding away his little money, but I couldn’t deal with the idea.

  Sometimes Dad looked at my face and he knew that I was afraid. He took my hand and said I was okay, not to worry about my health. I admitted that I was concerned about my blood pressure. Every couple of hours they checked his while I believed that mine was sky-high. My head was bursting from pressure. Once or twice when he was sleeping, I fumbled with the apparatus myself, wound it around my arm like when I was a kid and had tried to teach myself how to tie the phylacteries around my wrists and forehead, so that Dad and I would live and not get diseases. Dad asked a young nurse to check my blood pressure and she seemed happy to do it. After this, whenever it was her shift, she took my pressure and said that I was doing fine. I would feel better for a few hours.

  One morning Dad’s lawyer from Boston called to tell us that my aunt was returning Abe’s ownership in the business. Celia couldn’t bear this break from her sick brother. She was guilt-ridden and had made the decision without consulting her husband and son, who would later become very angry with her.

  The terrible fight was over. It was a miracle. In a couple of days Dad’s lawyer would fly to Florida with the papers for Abe to sign. He would have money again and there would be no more talk of selling the boat.

  I tried to tell Dad the great news, but he wasn’t listening and his face was dark. I needed him to hear that he had won the case. I tried to trick him. I said it would be fun to go down to the parking lot in a wheelchair and look at his Buick. He didn’t want to go but I wanted to jolt him, bring him back. I was sure that the smell of the new car would be a tonic for him. By the time we reached the car he was beating on the arms of the chair. I don’t give a fuck, he said. What are you trying to get away with! He was appalled that I had brought him out into the sunny parking lot.

  When we got back to the hospital room, Bob’s mother, Frances, was waiting for him. She was a robust, matronly lady, about seventy years old, with white hair. Many evenings she and Abe had sat on the patio of Bob’s house looking at the Ebb Tide while sipping a drink.

  Oh how are you, Abe, Frances said, engulfing my father in her huge chest. Good, he said, gathering himself for a lady caller. He told me to leave, he wanted to be alone with Frances.

  I left them for half an hour, and when I returned, Dad had fallen asleep.

  Look at this, poor boy, said Frances shaking her head. “Don’t tell anyone,” my father had scrawled on a napkin. “They’re keeping me here against my will. I’m going to run away with my boys. I’ll call when I can.”

  When the lawyer from Boston arrived at the hospital my father was out of touch: Hi, Abe, I’ve brought you something. Do you want to take a look and sign these papers, Abe? Abe! Dad gave him a wilting stare and added the words, Are you fuck’n kidding me? No way. />
  There was no forcing him, and I suggested to the attorney that we should sit quietly and let time pass. I knew this must seem odd to a man who billed at a high rate for his hours and was scheduled to fly back to Boston in the early afternoon. Dad wasn’t anywhere close and I was afraid that after twenty minutes the lawyer would stand up and take his leave of this surreal meeting. But instead he took off his jacket and sat by the bed. Hours passed and he missed the flight back to Boston. We waited for Dad to come back. Dad had told me that this man was a great tuna fisherman and that on Bimini he had a reputation for partying through the night, a wild man, was how Dad put it. But now the attorney had fallen into quiet waiting, a kind of reverie with me and Dad, who had eventually grown still.

  It was around dusk and Dad had a sweet, peaceful expression. The attorney quietly asked him to sign the papers and my father looked at me and asked mildly, Freddy, do you think I should?

  Dad, I think you should sign. I think it’s fine, Dad.

  He signed the papers with his favorite Parker pen but I don’t think Dad knew what he was signing or that he’d won.

  A few days later I was sleeping late on the boat when the phone rang. My father was tapping rapidly, all business. I’ll be right over, Dad.

  When I arrived in his hospital room he was sitting up with a concerned expression. Look at this, he said, pulling aside his sheet. Dad’s stomach and legs were covered with blood. He hadn’t shown anyone but he wanted me to know. I raced for the nurse, who started making phone calls while my father bled. Everyone had gone to lunch. I ran down the hall looking for a doctor, any doctor. I asked a janitor who was mopping the floor to help me. My father was bleeding to death.