Sunny's Nights

by Tim Sultan

  “Actually, Timmy, unless you had another destination in mind, I thought we might head to Jurassic Park. You know where that is, right?”

  “On the big screen?”

  “Nye. It’s down in the direction of Bay Ridge, though not anywhere that far. There used to be a pier there that since burnt down. It had been so hot in that fire, that all the bones, all the steel frame, bent and twisted. It looks like the skeleton of a dinosaur so I call it Jurassic Park. In some ways, the bones of that pier are more exciting to me as an artist than any sculpture you might find in a museum.”

  In the mid-nineties, there was a small contingent of canoeists in Red Hook who called themselves the Red Hook Navy. One would occasionally see them late in the day, pushing off the pier and disappearing into the shimmer as they paddled toward the Statue of Liberty. Some Fridays they would come in the bar and boast a little about where they had been. The far side of Governors Island. Up Buttermilk Channel to the Brooklyn Bridge. A neighborhood carpenter took a date to Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan, where they rented a space in a parking lot for their canoe while they went to dinner. I had had a vague idea about retracing their expedition, but Sunny made a collapsing pier sound more exciting than anything found in Manhattan. “Sure, Sunny. Let’s make a journey to Jurassic Park.”

  We slipped into a pair of life jackets I had brought along as an afterthought and carried the boat from the backyard through the bar, pausing by the front door underneath the photograph of Sunny’s uncle, beaming from the deck of the Lieutenant Ronaghan. “If Uncle Gigch was here for this, Timmy…I can see him right now shaking his head at me. He was always warning us about the river.”

  The trouble with offhand foreshadowing remarks is that we don’t understand their significance at the time.

  Outside, the sky was cloudless and the air crisp, the kind of fall morning that is usually the province of New England but finds its way down to the city on occasion. We raised the kayak above our heads and walked down the middle of the street toward the harbor. In those days, one was about as likely to encounter a car on Conover Street as to collide with another twosome portaging a boat.

  We dropped the kayak into the water and climbed aboard; I took the bow, Sunny the rear. The tip of Conover was quickly behind us and the water widened and our moods matched the expansiveness of the bay that opened up ahead.

  “Timmy! It’s amazing to see the harbor like this. To see Red Hook from the water. I haven’t done anything like this since I was, oh, maybe fifteen years old. In fact, I feel like I’m fifteen years old. You wouldn’t believe how this place has changed. We got the harbor to ourselves now but back then the river was so busy, ten minutes didn’t go by without ships warning other ships where they were. You had barges, ferries, navy ships. Nowadays they could be unloading ten ships with cargo twenty times as great as they were unloading in those days and you’d never even know it was happening. You don’t see it anymore. There’s no activity, there’s no music, there’s no sound, there’s no smell. You used to smell the coffee beans in the burlap sacks. You used to smell the produce. It seemed like ships from every nation in the world used to come through here.”

  “Why do I get the feeling you must have gotten into some shit back then?” I yelled over my shoulder.

  “Oh, fuhgeddaboudit! Literally, we did! The docks are where we learned to swim and all the sewage from their terlets came out of the hulls of the ships tied up down here. We would draw straws for who’d break the ice. What that meant was that those who lost the draw would jump in and push the shit out of the way and we would swim in that circle. We developed an immunity to disease that way, I suppose. Kids in other neighborhoods got vaccinations. We just swam in sailor shit.”

  I smelled tobacco and I knew without turning around that Sunny had stopped paddling to light a cigarette. He considered every moment an opportune time to smoke, even when his hands weren’t free. It was pleasant to talk like this over the splashing of the water, unhurried and with no real itinerary. We were on a holiday.

  “Did you climb up on the ships?”

  “I’d like to say yes, but no—I was afraid. You couldn’t actually climb up the ropes because they used to have rat protection. Line guards. But we would dare each other to run up the gangplanks. Not on the banana ships, though. They were taboo because we were told they were full of tarantulas. A kid’s imagination is such that you believed it. One bite, you’re dead! But one Thanksgiving, my brother Frank and his friend Bobby Peterson, they snuck up on a ship and they went to the galley and they grabbed the turkey and they came running out the back of the ship with the chef and sailors chasing them and us watching from the dock. And they threw the turkey overboard and just dove in after it, like that! Sad if you think about it, it being Thanksgiving, but to us it was just antics. And I know you know about antics, Timmy. You don’t climb the fuckin’ Brooklyn Bridge if you don’t know antics.”

  “I never stole a turkey from hungry sailors.”

  We had left Red Hook’s shorefront of warehouses and a police impound lot behind and were passing the mouth of the Gowanus Bay, an inlet at the easterly end of Red Hook. The swells were several feet deep, nothing like the minor chop close to shore. The wind had gotten sharper and we were undeniably working a little harder to make headway. Our progress told me that Sunny was reacquainting himself with his paddle after his smoke. We wigwagged onward, vacillating between a southeasterly and northeasterly course when, suddenly, Sunny let out a cry. I turned and saw his flyer’s hat in the water drifting fifteen, and quickly twenty, feet behind us.

  “Let it go, Timmy,” Sunny said.

  “We can get it, Sunny.”

  I began pulling hard on one side and Sunny followed my lead, reverse-paddling on the opposite side, and in the course of a couple minutes, we had turned the boat rather deftly, paddled back to his cap, snatched it out of the water, and resumed our original approximate bearing.

  “My mother, who don’t even drive, couldn’t have parked a car any better than the job we just did.”

  This statement made no sense on a number of levels but I didn’t disagree with him. Sunny was beaming and we were both feeling highly pleased with ourselves, brimming with overconfidence at our seafaring abilities. Jurassic Park, ferryboat graveyards, the Balzano ancestral home of Calabria. Anything seemed within reach that day. It’s at moments like these, the self-satisfied ones, that we are most prone to forgetting that Vanna White is always waiting in the wings.

  When we rolled, we rolled as smoothly as a bottle rolling off a tabletop. There was no struggle, no desperate attempt to throw our weight to one side, no yelp. We had been upturned as if by a great hand and unexpectedly dumped into the late-autumn water, and the boat, our splendid bar boat, was drifting upside down several feet away. I looked for Sunny at once and saw him floating a couple arm-lengths away, just out of reach of the hull.

  I yelled for him to hold on and, gripping the overturned boat to keep it from being borne away, pulled my way hand over hand until I was treading water in front of him and drew him toward me. His gray mane of hair drifted on the surface around him and he had a wild-eyed look on his face, like a water god who had grown old overnight and lost his powers. His head was tilted back as he struggled to keep his face above the waves. His woolen socks, his long underwear, his two pairs of pants, his pullover, his sweater, and his down jacket absorbed water better than a roll of Bounty.

  I said, “Sunny, we’ve got to try and flip this back. Now. We’re both going to push up at the same time, okay?”

  He nodded and we shoved at the boat futilely for a few seconds. We had no leverage and the waves slapped the upturned hull as if to counterpunch our efforts. Sunny let his head hang back again and a resigned look came over his face. I slipped one hand under his armpit.

  “Sunny! Sunny! Listen to me. We’re going to be all right.”

  “Timmy, I don’t think I’m going to make it. There were so many more paintings I wanted to paint.”
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  Sunny would be an artist to the end.

  I looked around. Though it was hard to judge from the waterline, we seemed to be about a quarter mile from shore, a distance I was sure I could cross if I were alone and slipped off my life jacket. I had returned alive from enough nighttime swims to know my abilities. But with Sunny, that short stretch of water seemed an impossible distance to cross. There were no ships in sight and even if there had been, our voices wouldn’t have carried far. We were on our own.

  I treaded water and looked up at the hull again. A notch ran along the keel.

  “Sunny, see that groove? I’m going to push you up and you’re going to get your fingers in there and you’re going to hold on while I get around to the other side.”

  I shoved Sunny upward and he clawed at the hard plastic until he managed to wedge his fingers into the notch. Letting go, I made my way around to the other side until I came back alongside him. Lunging out of the water, I grabbed his wrists before falling back, catapulting him up and onto the boat. I quickly hauled myself up and sat next to Sunny, who lay facedown and entirely still, his legs still partially submersed. He had become very quiet, as though he had fallen into a trance. I patted his back and said someone would see us. “We’ll be all right, Sunny. We’re okay. We’re okay.”

  The minutes passed and we drifted in silence. Boethius would have had something to say about this. He knew about dire straits, writing his most famous work, The Consolation of Philosophy, while in a cell awaiting his execution. Up to that point, things had been good for him. Born into a high family in the final days of the Roman Empire, he’d spent his career interpreting philosophy, translating scholarly texts from the Greek, involving himself in ecclesiastic debates—having the time of his life—until some envious bureaucrats defamed him to the monarch whom he served. Facing a grisly death, Boethius imagines himself visited by a woman personifying philosophy, and the two have a late-night bull session. They hit all the big topics that might preoccupy a sixth-century philosopher—predestination, free will, the nature of virtue, the meaning of justice. Weighty and abstruse matters, but what the Everyman in the Middle Ages took away from Consolation is the idea that we are always subject to fortune’s wheel. One moment you’re on top of the world, giving your acceptance speech, and by the afternoon, the wheel has turned a quarter notch. Perhaps only an eighth. If you’re lucky, it’s only inched ahead and prosperity will stick around for a while, but don’t be fooled. Earthly life is instability and the only recourse is to have a balanced view of things. Never get too high or too low on yourself.

  I looked at the distant Verrazano Bridge and imagined the cars, invisible to us, crossing the span, their drivers listening to Steve Somers or books on tape or searching their wallets for their toll money or looking at the horizon of the open ocean and wishing they were on their way to some place different entirely. All those people crossing that span of sky were oblivious to the struggle of the two tiny specks far below. That all of New York was unaware of us, that the great engine of the city kept humming without pause, seemed incredible.

  I scanned the shoreline again, this time spotting a police cruiser where earlier there had only been an empty pier. I began waving, at first to no apparent effect, until the driver’s side window rolled down and an arm emerged and briefly acknowledged us. I gave Sunny an excited squeeze and he briefly lifted his head like a turtle roused from sleep. “It’ll only be a little while now,” I told him. But we continued our slow drift, the current sloshing us and taking us moment by moment just a little farther from the pier, with no sign from the patrol car that a rescue operation was under way or that its occupants were in any way interested in our little caper. I began waving again. Once more, the arm came out of the car window, returned my wave, and withdrew.

  What the fuck, I thought.

  If we made it out of this, I vowed that I was going to track down the officers in the cruiser and present them with an anthology of modern British poetry, dog-eared to Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving but Drowning.”

  —

  EVENTUALLY, FROM A distance, the thump of a helicopter arose, and not long after it made a single low pass over, we saw a boat make a beeline toward us. An NYPD harbor unit pulled up alongside and first the two of us, and then the kayak, looking humiliatingly toy-like, were pulled aboard by the crew. The senior officer asked, “What did you think you were doing out there?” Shaking his head in disgust, another asked, “What kind of fools are you?” A third exclaimed, “Sunny! Is that you, Sunny?”

  Standing sheepishly in the stern, we were brought to the pier, where the patrol car had meanwhile been joined by a fire truck, an ambulance, and, inexplicably, a group of prisoners who had been ushered out of their school bus and who, like manacled sightseers, were now peering at us no less intently than if we had been recaptured Alcatraz escapees. On shore, the motley group of jailers, prisoners, land and water officers, firemen, and paramedics huddled around us while we stripped to our underwear and pulled blankets around our shoulders.

  Embarrassed by all the attention, Sunny asked whether a cab couldn’t be called to take us home. He fished a soggy hundred-dollar bill from a pocket and held it up as proof we weren’t entirely down and out. A murmur of appreciation passed through the prisoners. But the medics dutifully talked us into the ambulance and once we were there they talked us into being hooked up to heart monitors. Soon, Sunny and I were left alone again and sat facing each other, EKG cables hanging from our bare chests. He had bummed a cigarette from the ambulance crew, which he smoked with a slightly enraptured expression. Not so long ago in New York you could smoke both in bars and ambulances.

  “When I heard that helicopter, I thought to myself, ‘They sent the Italians to come get us.’ ”

  “What?”

  “The Italians, Timmy. Wop-wop-wop.”

  A siren’s wail broadcast our trip to a hospital in Brooklyn Heights, cars, we imagined from the back, scattering in our path. To our bewilderment, our arrival was treated as an actual emergency and we were placed on gurneys and wheeled into the ER. The orderlies left us side by side in a curtained corner, unsure of what would be done to us next. “I wish they weren’t making such a fuss about us, Timmy.”

  A nurse soon came over and announced that she needed to take Sunny’s core temperature. He opened his mouth but she shook her head slowly with a slight smile. “Other end,” she said in a cheery Caribbean accent. Sunny began shaking his head, insisting that he had caught such a fright when the boat tipped over that he shat in his pants. The ruse did not work and with a woebegone expression, Sunny rolled onto his side and I looked away. It would be my turn soon enough.

  As we waited for our temperatures to rise over the next several hours, doctors came into the emergency room and asked to see the rescued sailors. We had our pictures taken with Wanda, our nurse. We played along with their amusement at our misadventure, but Sunny was restless. He repeatedly asked Wanda whether “the PMS truck” would be taking us home any time soon and she rolled her eyes and tsk-tsked as she went about her duties. The PMS truck was the kind of truck only Sunny could see, in the same way that only Sunny had a prescription to the New York Post and only Sunny was put under by an amnesiologist when going into surgery.

  I wanted to sleep but Sunny was talking quietly from his bed next to mine, half to me, half to himself, and I listened with my eyes closed. I always tried to listen when Sunny talked.

  “Those officers on the harbor patrol, they reminded me of these three guys on the harbor unit that used to come whenever they had a chance to tie up down by the bar. This was a few years before I met you, Timmy. I suppose they’d seen that photograph of my uncle Gigch in his uniform on his boat through the window. They loved to come in there because it gave them a sense of what it was like in the old days. A lot of verbiage was exchanged. One of them was a young guy, strong. Close-cropped hair, kind of muscular. Kenny was his name. Ken Hansen. Really, what a sweet nature he had. A lot of the guys on the water pat
rol have a certain friendliness that earth police don’t have. If you notice on the water, people on boats, they wave. ‘How are you? Did you catch anything today?’ If you’re marooned, they’re the first ones to help you. They tend to do more. If they’re not as tough as can be, they’re as gentle as can be.

  “Anyway, one day the crew came in without Kenny and I asked about him. They were like in a state of mourning and they told me that he had drowned in the harbor. The story I got was that he’d volunteered for mock rescue for a television crew. He volunteered to be the victim. And from what I understand, they asked him if he would mind very much taking off his life vest to make it look real and so he did. And he dove in and treaded water and then disappeared. Imagine, a grown man, strong swimmer. But it’s so easy to get caught in those undercurrents and they’re running every which way. That’s how unpredictable water is. You swim off the piers, Timmy, the way we used to when I was a boy. That isn’t like swimming in the ship lane, but I do worry about you every time you disappear from the bar at night.

  “I tell you, I was ready to go today. I was sure I was a goner and I wanted to make it quick. I was ready to slip out of that vest and take a big gulp of water. But then I thought of how Tone and my mother would have to identify my body after we’d been found, perhaps weeks from now. All black and blue. And I realized, I couldn’t do it. In fact, I thought of how we’d be discolored in the way Cézanne’s fruit was discolored in his still lifes. His paintings, they incorporated the changing color, the bruising of the fruit as it rotted. Strange, in that moment, I thought of my lover, my mother, and Cézanne.”

  With that he, or I, or both of us, fell asleep.

  —

  LATE IN THE day we were handed two bags with our clothes and discharged. It seemed downright callous to expect us to put our sopping-wet pants and sweaters and socks back on and walk out into the mid-November chill. But this was a hospital, not a bar, and nobody took up a clothing collection for us. Still wearing our paper gowns, we wincingly pulled on our pants and shoes and Sunny slipped into his life vest (mine had been lost at some point during the rescue) and, slinging the rest of our belongings over our shoulders, we strolled outside. The hospital overlooked the harbor, which now in the late afternoon sun, was restored to the benign vista that sightseers on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade are used to. On Atlantic Avenue, we stood on the curb hailing cabs until one driver, untroubled by the sight of two men wearing hospital gowns and one a life vest, stopped to pick us up and took us back to the bar. No one had even missed us.