The Last Marlin

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  By now I admired my mother’s art but I still believed that she should live a more proper and tidy life. I was able to find the energy to battle with her over issues of propriety; maybe I persisted just to feel myself alive. It bothered me that one-third of the Persian rug from Great Neck was rock-hard from resin overflow when she poured the toxic material into molds for her books. She didn’t notice that she had destroyed the rug and that her apartment reeked of resin and that when she worked, the fumes drifted down the hall and drove her neighbors crazy—they beat on her door, which she found amusing, and they complained to Stanley Bard, who complained to me. I gave her a gas mask for her birthday and urged her to pour on newspapers.

  When I criticized her eccentricities and sloppy habits, Mother laughed in my face. Stella insisted that great art had to be raw, immediate, gestural, ragged, emotional, uncompromising; it wasn’t neat or carefully controlled or pretty. Mother also believed that art demanded pain and poverty—worldly success was the kiss of death for a serious artist. She dressed like a bag lady and never told a soul that she had spent a dozen years in Great Neck with Abe or that her father, now very old and sick, had once brightened cities and towns with his lighting fixtures. I think Mom actually convinced herself that she was dirt-poor and couldn’t afford the rent. Her roots were mortifying to Stella. She felt great anger toward Abe and her father for their years of chicanery and lies, and she cultivated this rage for power and energy in her art. She was often angry with me and repeatedly called me a bullshit artist like Abe.

  One evening I was sitting with Allen Ginsberg smoking grass on the ruined Persian rug. He was entranced by her books. “Words are lies, Allen,” Mother said, which jolted me—he was the great musician of words. Howl gave me goose bumps whenever I read the first lines. Ginsberg smiled sweetly and looked around. Mother had learned how to paint within the resin and in some works, faces and stories emerged from a livid atmosphere of color, fissures and crusts. Blackened self-portraits stared up from bleeding bindings. In one book Moby Dick was decomposing, wrapped in kelp and despair; in a few volumes stillborn angels writhed under glass; there were bound pages of Bartleby’s ledgers, mostly indiscernible and evoking futility. There were many tragedies and religious stories with pranks mixed in: strange fruit dripping from shelves, birds nesting in bindings, a deformed broadbill eating fat squids the color of lemons. On another wall there were rows of more or less opaque volumes where hidden details gave way to long sweeps of color like the furious paintings of the Great Neck days, and the sculptures also shared the same crusty textures and dark hues of earlier work. Also on the shelves were a few photographs of her father as a young man when he was still a laborer before Globe, a seascape my brother painted as a kid, and a couple of recent photographs of Bill with long hair and a withering stare. This environment was constantly changing as Stella tinkered and replaced volumes according to her mood. Some days the whole sweep of volumes was alive and beguiling, while other times the massive work seemed claustrophobic and dead as bones.

  Allen Ginsberg had brought along a lady friend. She wasn’t feeling well. She coughed throughout the long evening and didn’t speak much. At one point Ginsberg drew a manuscript of new poems out of his leather briefcase and read us a half-dozen. He was delighted by Mother’s bookish world and soon began playing his harmonica and singing. Then when it was time to leave, this girl started to vomit. Ginsberg paused for maybe a beat, and then he opened his briefcase with his manuscript of new poems and she vomited all over the pages while he held her head. I drove them back to the East Village and found myself wondering if Ginsberg would have sacrificed his poems if not for Mother’s remarks about words. Probably.

  My brother’s absence paced Mother’s art life. She told her friends that Bill was away writing novels and plays. Mother worked her way into this fantasy—they were both making books. She poured at night on her tiny balcony, and despite the toxic fumes she brought wet sculptures into her bedroom so she could see them with a fresh eye in the morning. She believed that things would go bad and she wouldn’t be able to work when Bill came back from Morocco. Stanley Bard finally convinced her to stop pouring resin in her apartment by allowing her to use a small room in the basement of the hotel. Neither of them anticipated that the noxious fumes would rise through the air shafts and sicken half the Chelsea residents. Then Mother took refuge in the art colonies, Yaddo and MacDowell, where she could work with her toxic materials in a proper studio or outdoors. She was the first artist to have a solo show treating the book as a sculptural object. She later had many exhibitions and tributes for her work, including the Pollock-Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award. But Stella was dismissive about the trappings of success and often construed good notices or even compliments from friends as lies or slaps in the face—maybe she was afraid of losing her working anger. What truly mattered to Stella was working every day and, of course, Bill.

  In Mom’s bedroom in the Chelsea there was a prized photograph of Bill with a bearded friend, each of them holding five large bricks of dark-chocolate-colored hashish. They had smuggled the drugs in from Mexico and Bill would soon use his money for a new life. His friend looked goofy holding the drugs, but my brother appeared calm and resolute on the eve of great adventure. Always in Bill’s adult life there was a need for danger and new beginnings pulling against an unctuous dissolute yearning for home that stuck to him like a shameful habit.

  Bill was mysterious about his Tangier life and tried to manage the fragments and rumors that came to us from the Casbah. He was writing a play and taking trips into the Sahara like a character in a Paul Bowles novel. On the narrow streets of the city he wore his djellaba and passed for Moroccan or Lebanese. In this outfit I could imagine my brother feeling like royalty in disguise, a Great Neck aristocrat slumming at the Café of the Dancing Boy, smoking his be-jeweled hashish pipe, watching the men play checkers while the little boy danced in regal clothes. John Clemans, my college roommate, visited Tangier and reflected afterward that in his days with my brother not much transpired but there was always the anticipation that something unusual would soon take place, something erotic or on the edge.

  Bill discovered a stunning house built into a cliff two hundred feet above the Mediterranean. “From the air the house looks like a ship about to be launched,” he wrote in a letter to Mother. He intended to live his life in this house above the sea.

  The Ghosts of Big Tuna

  ON BIMINI THE BLUE WATER’S DINING ROOM ON THE HILL WAS ABE’S favorite breakfast spot, offering a luscious view of the Gulf Stream, comfortable captain’s chairs, hearty meals. In the morning the room was filled with the crews and owners of sportfishing boats wolfing down big breakfasts, sharing plans for the day, checking the wind. The wind told a lot about the fishing day, particularly in the spring. Dad smoked a cigarette and looked content, which made me happy.

  My father drew conviction from the bustle and purpose of the crews, the strength of hefty anglers who pulled sandbags down the Bimini beach to train for giant bluefin tuna. When he was sitting around with the guys at breakfast his face would flush with excitement and I might punch him lightly on the shoulder; Dad would draw back his fist as if he were going to unload one on me.

  One morning he and I were eating breakfast here when the room emptied of fishermen in a half-minute. One of the guys had seen a school of six-hundred-pound bluefin pushing through the light blue water right in front of the hotel. The fishing crews went racing down the hill to their boats, trying to be the first to bait the school. Dad stiffened a little as if we were missing out on the action; maybe we should go after them, crank up the Ebb Tide and try to put a big tuna in the boat. But we weren’t rigged for bluefin. A little later we left the harbor and trolled for marlin a mile or two offshore of the tuna boats. In the spring we had the whole Gulf Stream of marlin to ourselves—the other boats were all after giant tuna.

  In those years, when the wind blew briskly from the southwest, tremendous schools of bluefin came to the su
rface and swam along the edge of the Gulf Stream where you could see their massive shadows against the sand bottom. Between May and the beginning of July hundreds of thousands of these gigantic, graceful fish passed the Bimini Islands heading north from Cuba and the southern cays. In the morning the finest sportfishing boats in the world raced one another out of the Bimini harbor, creating a bedlam of roaring engines and big churning wakes, any small boat in their way be damned. These custom-built superfast fishing machines sprinted south along the edge of the Stream, which was called “the alley.” The captains rode in towers thirty or forty feet above the water peering into the waves. When a captain spotted a school he wheeled the boat around and chased the fish full-throttle, and when he was close, a mate in the cockpit threw over a single bait. The captain tried to pass it right in front of the fish. Usually the first boat to bait a school was the one that got a strike and the trailing boats encountered wary or disinterested tuna. The competition was so fierce to be the first to a school that captains wouldn’t risk coming off the lurching towers for a minute; they would eat lunch in big seas while holding on for life, piss in plastic bags while staring into the water for giant shadows and fins riding down waves. Often when boats chased down schools they cut one another off like racing cars, occasionally they collided and there were terrible accidents with boats going down.

  During the golden tuna days of the fifties, sixties and seventies, the migrating schools seemed limitless and boats often came into the marinas with three or four giant bluefin shoehorned into the cockpit. Occasionally the fish swam right into the Bimini harbor and the boats hooked up six-and seven-hundred-pounders beside the flats in shallow water and all the local people stood on shore and watched tuna make their incomparable runs while the anglers hauled back on rods so stout they barely bent despite the tremendous strain on backs and knees. What a show! Captains whiplashed transmissions from forward hard into reverse chasing down fish and frequently transmissions and engines came apart. The owners flew in mechanics and costly new diesels from the States and the massive engines were replaced at the dock. No expense was too great for bluefin.

  For years owners and crews of the boats debated whether or not the big fish should be boated or brought alongside and then released. “Releasing a tuna is like having a great piece of ass and not coming” was a refrain often heard from macho man anglers on the docks of Bimini and Cat Cay.

  “Now the tuna don’t hardly come through anymore,” says James Rolle, who was the greatest of all Bimini’s tuna mates, a powerful and adroit wire man who these days runs a tiny corner grocery store on the hill a little ways up from the Blue Waters dining room. “We don’t need to debate anymore about releasing tuna because they’re almost all gone.”

  Gulf Stream crossings were usually a buffer, a transition between worlds. Coming over from Florida I looked for fish and tried to let go of concerns of the city, which wasn’t always easy. On some trips the fifty-mile expanse of ocean was just sloppy and cold, the water stinging our eyes all the way across. On the first trip to Bimini after Dad, the Stream was flat and hot, full of glare and fouled from days of stillness. There were no fish in this ocean. We felt drugged out there, hopeless.

  The twenty-footer was weighed down by a thousand pounds of food, bait, Dad’s heavy rods and reels that I had taken off the big Ebb Tide, luggage, supplies for Bimini friends, an air conditioner, a small freezer for the little shack we had rented in Porgy Bay and also by malaise and hospital memories. We had no freeboard and any big breaking sea would have washed over the bow and filled the boat. I steered through thick ridges of seaweed and had to shut her down a half-dozen times to unwind warm slimy weed from the prop. It was dangerous to cross with such a heavy load, but there was no sea to speak of. The water was rotten and listless and there was no hump.

  A customs official noticed us cruising through the harbor mouth at dusk. He hauled us into the station and accused us of smuggling supplies onto the island at night to avoid paying duty. He was right. I paid the fine.

  The first days back the ocean seemed lonely and I couldn’t imagine which way to head, north or south, who cares. Pulling baits across the calm water I felt as if I had fled New York and all the reasonable choices and ambitions of adulthood. My shaky writing career atomized in the insufferable midday heat. Bonnie moped and complained about the sun burning her skin and that we were spending all of our money to catch fish. But we couldn’t catch a fish. Barracudas wouldn’t strike my baits. We argued and I hardly cared if the baits were dragging clumps of seaweed. The heat wave and becalmed ocean worked against us.

  My friend Craig came out with us and agreed with Bonnie that fishing was pointless. I tried to will myself back into the ocean. While I watched the baits Craig chain-smoked and mulled over his future. He was no longer running the boat for Judy Hammond. Day after day he wore the same chinos and work shirt. Craig was basically homeless, sleeping here or there, sometimes on our sofa.

  Maybe it was the third or fourth day on the island, we were trolling in front of the harbor mouth at about five in the evening. The ocean was slick calm and blinding with glare, the worst conditions for billfishing, where you want some white water for skipping baits. I looked toward the shore and saw a mast, I thought it was a mast, about four or five hundred yards off. But it was curved like a dorsal fin. Much too tall for a fin, but I eased the boat in that direction. It was three times the height of any marlin fin I had ever seen before and splintered at the top from battle or perhaps age. I trolled a bait in front of this mythic fish, it must have been fifteen or sixteen feet long, but the marlin never stopped moving to the north. It had no interest in our bait and, of course, we could never have landed such a creature. Eventually the fish started to go down but very slowly. After a few minutes I could still see the tip of the dorsal, and even after it slipped under, the marlin made a rippling wake on the surface. On Bimini we described this two-thousand-pounder to a couple of the captains of the big fishing boats, but they considered Bonnie and me rank amateurs telling fish stories.

  A few days later the weather turned and we headed offshore into a stiff breeze and a four-foot head sea. We were wet from spray and invigorated by the new weather. Schools of baby flying fish broke off the tops of waves like shattering glass. A few flying fish landed on the gunwale and Bonnie tossed them over. It was hard to stay in the boat in the breaking sea but it was fun. On Bimini the wind can change everything. In the afternoon we hooked a couple of dolphin on feathers.

  Ocean fishing in the twenty-footer was gritty and basic, especially when the wind was blowing. We went to the bathroom over the gunwale, got our asses wet from the white water. We trolled big bonefish and mackerel through valleys of ocean, turned into big breakers to avoid broaching or steered away from head seas when we could get away with it. To keep from being tossed over, we held on or braced against the gunwale while we rigged a live bonito. It was a whole day of isometric exercises. We were sore from banging against the steering wheel, the side of the console or the reels. If the fishing was good we were covered with slime and wet all day, literally a step away from the waves. It was a different life than on the bridge of a big sportfishing boat, where you could put your feet up like a tourist.

  Maybe ten days into the trip Bonnie hooked a small marlin and fought it standing up wearing a belly harness. She had the hundred-pounder alongside in a half hour. I wired it without difficulty and then Bonnie leaned over the side and snatched the bill of the fish in her two hands. She reached with one hand to pull the hook out and continued to tow the fish alongside to force water through its gills until the marlin got back its strength and then she let it go. Bonnie didn’t worry about getting yanked over or speared. She’d left all of her fears in New York. We’d caught our first marlin by ourselves in the twenty-footer. The following day we caught a sailfish and had another chance at a marlin.

  Sometimes the ocean just opens up, reveals itself. All of a sudden there’s no more resistance or dead water, the clues are sharp a
nd urgent. Color changes, wind and weed lines, edges of storms and tidal rips are fresh trails. You move ahead like a scout, body tingling and sweating, no more small talk with wives and friends, just listening to the seabirds, watching each dip and flutter—the birds will show where to put the baits. In such moments I can smell fish, and even the first time this sensation felt familiar. When a captain is in a zone he can fill his boat while other fishermen are hardly getting a strike. I’ve seen it many times.

  That summer we learned to catch permit, a tough-fighting, platter-shaped fish, by casting crabs on the deep flats and channels around Sandy Cay, twenty miles south of Bimini. To the north of the island we used a downrigger and trolled for kingfish. We brought in two over eighty pounds. We caught a fifty-pound African pompano. After we ate it and threw away the carcass, someone told me that it was almost surely a world record. That fish gave us both ciguatera poisoning, aching joints and a little nausea, but we kept fishing.

  I discovered that I had this knack for finding fish; more and more I could anticipate the strikes before they happened. But I wasn’t good at the mechanical side of the sport. Craig kept our engine running, and Bonnie charmed captains and mates on the dock to teach her the best knot to use for double lines or the newest way to rig bonito for live baiting.