by Kirsten Koza
BEFORE CIGANA BECAME MY HOME, I SPENT A MONTH LOOKING AT HER. She had been left on the hard in the Rodney Bay boatyard in Saint Lucia, a 27-foot Bristol sailboat built in 1968, sitting on stilts until we were ready to splash.
Cigana wasn’t mine. She belonged to my friend Chris, whom I had met just six months ago in Bar Harbor, Maine. Before Chris was my friend, he was my boss—he managed the restaurant where I had worked in the summer. Halfway through the restaurant’s season, he asked me if I’d be interested in helping him deliver his boat from one Caribbean island to a more southern one. From that moment on, we were friends. Although as I stood in flip-flops on the sweltering hot cement of the yard, looking up at Cigana—a very small whale out of water—I realized that our friendship hadn’t existed for very long. I wasn’t a sailor and I didn’t want to become one. I was 22 years old on a one-way ticket away from home, and this was my first big leap off North America. My goal had been to get out of Maine in January and maybe become someone I didn’t yet know.
Chris and I climbed up the ladder and stepped on deck. There was a tiller at the stern and a bench for you to sit on while operating that tiller. Below was a V-berth, where Chris would sleep, and a padded bench that doubled as a table, where I would sleep. There was a gimbaled Coleman stove that would swing with the boat’s movement, a VHF radio, a single cheetah-print pillow that we would rotate back and forth, and that was pretty much it.
“And this is the head,” Chris said. He was standing in the single foot of space that separated his V-berth from my table-bed and pointing to a toilet that looked like an accessory you could buy from a doll magazine.
“Most American asses couldn’t fit on that thing,” I said.
It wasn’t really the size that bothered me though; it was that we were about to become roommates in 27 feet of space. Sitting on that toilet and trying to concentrate, behind a piece of plywood, while he existed two feet away—sipping a rum punch and maybe perusing a book on nautical knots—was more humiliating than just taking a dump over the side.
“Well we could just go over the side,” Chris said.
We both laughed. Then we stopped talking about it.
After a month spent sanding Cigana’s every surface, and finishing her with black tar paint labeled only with a skull and crossbones, we launched. Our first haul was 63 nautical miles to the island of Bequia. It took 8 hours in 14-foot swells and a rainstorm, and we almost laid the boat completely over. I say “we” but we weren’t really a “we”— I had no business being on that boat. For the first three hours of our journey I was passed out on Dramamine, happily snoozing on our limited seating space while my ears filled up with raindrops.
“Can you go below deck and make us some sandwiches?” Chris asked me when I woke up.
He had been rotating back and forth between clenching the tiller and abandoning it all together to mess with the sail. I was supposed to be holding a chart and pretending to understand it, but I had taken a nap instead.
I shook my head at the idea of making sandwiches. Looking through that hatch, down into the lair that was “below deck,” felt like reliving my worst Ketamine experience. It was a deep, demonic alternate universe down there, a K-hole waiting to happen. All the ingredients necessary to make a basic ham sandwich would be right in front of my face, and yet completely out of my grasp as a I bounced around in an empty can just trying to reach them.
“I don’t think so,” I said. We went hungry.
We spent a week in Bequia. I took Rosie, our rowboat, out every morning and Chris taught me how to coil a line into a perfect circle so it looked nice on the dock.
“This will get you a job on any boat,” he said, admiring his work.
I nodded. I didn’t want a job on a boat; I just wanted to get a tan on one.
We spent so much time on shore sneaking into the yacht club to take showers and use the bathroom, that our head conversation hadn’t been revisited. By the time we got to Mustique, I had murdered a yellowfin tuna with a winch handle and I knew how to read a nautical chart, but I still hadn’t used that head.
We met a captain who told us about a Norwegian family who had just passed through. They were circumnavigating on a Bristol not much bigger than ours.
“And the funny thing is,” the guy said. “They don’t even have a head. They’ve just been going over the side!”
Hm, I thought.
“Hm,” Chris said.
That night, when all of Mustique was sleeping, I experienced my first water birth.
“I have a confession to make,” I told Chris the next morning. He was making us egg sandwiches with sides of sliced mango.
I told him about how easy it had been last night, to just climb a few steps down the rope ladder and dip my bum into the cool black water. Nobody knew, nobody was up, it was completely innocent. Plus the stars were beautiful.
“I did it this morning!” he said, launching into an opinion about “cutting out the middle man” and “the fish eat it anyway.”
And so it began, our spiral into the depths of real boat life. We were drinking warm rum for breakfast; our cuticles were ripping down to our knuckles from the lack of fresh water; I had bought a drum in an effort to “remake my image”; and we were dropping deuces over the safety lines like two ships passing in the dark—Chris going in the morning while I went at night.
By the time we reached Petit Saint Vincent, water birthing had become “our thing.” It was the heroine of bodily functions. It wasn’t wrong because we’d both agreed to it, and it wasn’t disgusting because it happened in the dark.
Then I did it in the middle of the afternoon.
We were anchored off Union Island. The water: turquoise. The sand: completely white. All of our harbor neighbors existed in their own separate universes on their own separate boats, proving that yacht life is not the same for everyone.
A group of smooth-chested Eastern Europeans oiled up to their techno music on a nearby catamaran, while their hired crew served them cold bottles of Hairoun from a cooler with ice. A French woman sat on a lounge chair on the deck of her Hinckley 38, sipping an espresso and flipping through Vogue—occasionally looking up to scoff at the untz-untz beats that were polluting her holiday from next door.
And I went for a swim and took a dump in the water. I thought it would be like it always had been—invisible and instantly out of my life. It would sink or something, float away from the harbor and into the open ocean to become another morsel in the aquatic food chain. But I was mistaken. I panicked. I splashed. There was nothing I could do. The evidence that I had gotten too comfortable with (my own version of yacht life) was staring me right in the face in broad daylight—nipping at my heels when I tried to swim away, like some kind of magnetized mutant Water World Chihuahua.
This wasn’t my first brush with humiliation brought on by bodily functions. In the 8th grade, I peed my pants while standing directly in front of my boyfriend and then claimed I had spilled some mustard. In high school, I clogged my Spanish teacher’s toilet at a Christmas party. In college, I got drunk and farted in front of the guy I was in love with, then immediately cried about it. But this, this was fucking brutal.
I swam back to the Cigana and fumbled for the rope ladder. Finding the first rung I assumed an unavoidable squat position to start climbing. In my peripheral vision I could see our neighbor, the French woman, staring down on me from her much larger and much more expensive ivory tower—moored just a stone’s throw away from dirty, little Cigana.
Her stare was telling me what I already knew—I didn’t belong. I was an animal, a grease stain on her respectable yachting life. The European techno music was bad, but I was worse.
I pulled my body weight up the ladder and rolled onto the deck in the typical one-leg-up-near-shoulder-exposing-bikini-clad-crotch-to-the-world fashion.
“Jesus, how many mangos have you eaten?” Chris asked, looking over my shoulder, then around the harbor. Everyone had shutte
red themselves inside like a bunch of frightened hobbits. The Caribbean Sea was now contaminated, no telling when it would be safe.
I shoved Chris below deck and closed up the hatch like the rest of them, locking us in our cave to contemplate our sins. “Don’t go out there,” I said. “We’re monsters.”
An hour later, we changed harbors, but we never did change our ways.
Emma Thieme is a 20-something freelance writer from Maine. She’s good at driving long distances and bad at folding clothes. You can find more of her writing on the Matador Network, where she works as a contributing editor. Follow her @emmacthieme.
JOHANNA GOHMANN
The Wind that Shakes the Barley
The best worst first Thanksgiving ever in Dublin.
FOR THE VERY FORTUNATE AMONG US, WHEN WE THINK OF THANKSGIVING we are flooded with cinnamon-scented memories of pie, family, and turtleneck sweaters in burnt autumnal shades. At the very least, we might reminisce about throwing up green bean casserole, or drunkenly arguing with our fathers about the Iraq war.
But for me, whenever I think of our cherished “Turkey Day,” I am gripped with such a cringe-inducing memory that I am left with no recourse but to slap my own forehead and sing “Jimmy Crack Corn!” at optimal volume in order to shake the embarrassment from my brain.
The year is 2010, and I have the pleasure of hosting my very first, grown-up, adult Thanksgiving since getting married. I am living in Dublin, Ireland, at the time, having been lured there by my Irish husband (never underestimate the power of multiple dimples). While cooking large game birds and hosting a dinner party would make me sweat under normal circumstances, I now have the added challenge of pulling this off in a country where asking for canned pumpkin makes the clerk stare as though you’ve just requested stewed penguin ovaries.
Fortunately, I have two wonderful American friends who hop a plane and head over to help me celebrate My First Thanksgiving. I then invite three Irish friends and offer to initiate them into our famous gut-buster holiday. Because I have been known to burn even Bagel Bites, and am not sure whether fennel is meat or grain, I enlist one of my American visitors to cook. This friend is fortunately skilled in the culinary arts, and she happily takes on the challenge, cooking an enormous turkey and some Stove Top that was smuggled in via her carry-on. I assist her by standing at the stove and drinking wine, offering helpful commentary on how disgusting it is that there are still feathers attached to our main course.
There are a few hiccups, such as when faced with the perplexing knobs of the Celsius oven. And then there is a brief moment of Irish panic when my husband realizes she is only cooking a mere 12 pounds of potatoes. But he races to the shop in time to pick up a few more bags, and his mini-famine fears are abated.
Soon our Irish friends arrive, ready to participate in our North American custom of gluttonously overeating poultry and gravy. The Irish usually reserve this activity for something they call “Sunday Dinner,” and they are very curious to learn more about our culturally specific traditions. One Irish guest is a single lad, while the other is a married fellow who is helping along his heavily pregnant wife.
Together, we gather round our kitchen table and its borrowed card table extension: four Irish, three Americans. We settle before the plastic tablecloth, passing dishes, pouring wine, cheerfully chattering about our various customs and homelands, the American Office vs. Gervais, and whether or not peanut butter is the work of the gods or Lucifer himself.
As a show of embracing the true spirit of Thanksgiving (but really, more for the amusement of my American guests), I invite the Irish to share with us their national anthem. It’s written in Gaelic, which sounds a bit like Elvish, and is therefore quite a lingual treat for non-Irish ears. We patiently listen to their song to Sauron, then break loudly into our own rocket-filled hymn, happy to showcase our obvious anthem superiority. U-S-A! U-S-A!
The Irish roll their eyes at our typical American hubris, but the tension is cut short by the Bryan Adams classic, “Summer of ’69.” We all belt the song in its entirety, united once more, and living proof that Adams’ ode to youths having sexual intercourse in the summertime is truly the anthem of the people.
The evening rolls on, silverware is clinking, gravy and wine are guzzled, and in a moment of nervous energy that is possibly aided by my fifth glass of Syrah, I decide to toy with the Irish and their ignorance of Turkey Day. I inform them that it’s a very important tradition to quiz the guests on American history, and whoever answers incorrectly must then allow a mustache of shame to be painted upon their faces with the burnt end of a wine cork. The Irish nod nervously, and then excitedly field our questions. When one of them flounders, I happily smear the cork residue across his face.
Unfortunately, my ploy quickly backfires, as I am the second to answer a question incorrectly. Howard Zinn I am not. My husband takes great delight in drawing some broad, handlebar facial hair onto my upper lip, no doubt wishing he could pop the cork into my mouth and silence me for the rest of the evening.
The meal now consumed, the Irish stare at me expectantly. And what is phase two of this Thanksgiving affair? Their shining blue eyes seem to ask. Unsure what to do, the table falls into silence. That’s when my dear pregnant friend attempts to save the moment and turns to me with a smile. Remember that amusing story I recently told her? Why don’t I share the story with the rest of the table?
I instantly know the story she is speaking of, and without pausing to ponder if Emily Post would endorse it as polite dinner party repartee, the words are flying from my mouth: “So my friend told me that she has a friend who performs oral sex on her husband while he’s defecating.”
Glasses pause in midair. Second helpings of stuffing cease. In the background it seems as if even Feist has paused midcaterwaul.
“No waaaay!”
“But why?!?”
“Is he on the toilet at the time?”
I explain that yes, he utilizes a toilet, and there are more howls of disgust. And skepticism. I am accused of fabricating this outlandish tale. As proof, I offer to call my source and have her verify the tale. With my wobbly wine fingers, I put my iPhone on speaker and attempt to punch in her number.
“Darling.” My husband gently stills my hand. He wonders, perhaps, if this call is a bad idea? Because the source, who is my friend, is also technically my editor. And therefore my boss. Wet blanket that he is, my husband thinks it might not be in my best interests to put my boss on speakerphone at a dinner party and then ask her to recount her friend’s story of scatological sex play. I, of course, am quite certain that he is wrong, and that this is a perfectly sound plan. A small wrestling match ensues, until he physically pries the phone from my fingers and proceeds to hide it.
The table has now had more time to reflect on this tale of bowl-side fellatio, and now there are many pressing questions. The ladies want to know WHY on Earth?—while the men are bashfully trying to explain the mechanics of the prostate. Regardless, the whole room (Irish and American) is united in the front that in no known universe would they ever want to participate in such an act—neither giving nor receiving. Not with ANYONE. We are all in agreement that the couple in question should be allowed to do as they wish in the privacy of their marital lavatory, but we also agree that there is no human alive or dead with whom we would ever consider performing such a feat. Not even for Angelina Jolie! The men nod gravely. When someone throws out to the ladies the prospect of a young Paul Newman, there is, to his credit, a small pause of consideration. But still, a resounding “No!” Not even circa Cool Hand Luke.
More wine is quickly opened to help wash this sordid tale from everyone’s memory bank. One of the Irish guests apparently needs something a bit stronger in order to press on, and he fashions a cigarillo from some magical leprechaun herbs. He invites everyone to join him outside, and we all agree. For isn’t this as our Native American friends would have wanted? This passing of the Irish peace pipe from one culture t
o another? We all pile out the door, leaving the pregnant Irish guest to stare at the turkey carcass and sing “The Fields of Athenry” to her stomach.
We return to the bottle-strewn table, everyone now thoroughly mellowed by the peace pipe and wine and the gallon drum of potatoes. The clock is ticking near 1:00 A.M. and the evening is winding down. Glasses of water are poured, one of my American friends excuses herself to the bathroom, and a few yawns make their way around the table. I sit back, patting my full stomach with a smug, Henry VIII-esque contentment. The party shall go down as a success, I think.
That is, until the evening takes a turn. A horrific, irreparable turn. In under 10 seconds, all of the good tidings and cross-cultural inroads and communion over a shared meal goes up as quickly as a puff of cigarillo smoke.
What happens is this: someone says something funny. Or maybe not even that funny. But whatever it is, it makes me break into the kind of hysterical, silent laughter that causes my body to quake uncontrollably, like I’m being electrocuted while smiling. And this, in turn, causes my body to betray me, in the ultimate bodily betrayal…
I, THE HOSTESS, interrupt the relaxed discourse of the post-Thanksgiving meal with what can only be described as thunderous flatulence—a sound so magnificently booming it is as if a Concorde is once again in flight and passing o’er head.
Did that really just happen?!? Dear God, am I awake, or in the throws of the ultimate anxiety fever dream? No. I am awake. And all around me, my dinner guests’ jaws have opened in astonishment. My own husband is looking at me like I have just ripped off my face and exposed reptilian lizard flesh. The room is stunned into silence. And then, from the far end of the table, I hear my poor pregnant friend’s husband turn to her in accusation: “Jesus honey, was that you?”
And at this, the suspension of time ends, and the room explodes into laughter, as my friends howl, wiping tears from their watering eyes.