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  Praise for The Last Marlin

  “The author of Searching for Bobby Fischer has written a graceful father-son memoir that artfully braids rich, disparate strands: Atlantic game fishing, the New York wholesale hustle, dysfunctional Jewish clannishness, and the decline of pelagic life.... This elegiac view of remnant worlds, of stinkpots and what is now called declining family values, infuses the book with tragedy even as it celebrates the slap of tuna on wet decks off Montauk and Bimini.”

  —Outside

  “Finding purity in the rarified world of big-game fishing was Ernest Hemingway’s forte, and he imbued it with transcendent significance. Fred does the same in The Last Marlin, but in far more human terms.”

  —John Clemans, Motorboating & Sailing

  “As Searching for Bobby Fischer used chess as a canvas to portray a father-son relationship, The Last Marlin goes beyond fishing to explore the inner life of Fred and his vibrant yet enigmatic father Abe.... This suspenseful book will sweep you away, break your heart, and leave you smiling.”

  —Chesslife

  “The book is beautifully written, with lines of prose flowing easily into the next. Each line, and the space in between, serves to fill out a picture of how the author coped with the wreckage of his early life. The memoir is not candy coated.... We come to care about these people. In the process we also come to understand Fred Waitzkin ... a surprisingly gentle journey through some very turbulent waters.”

  —The Martha’s Vineyard Times

  “Though there is much sorrow and confusion on these pages, there is great beauty—a nearly profligate amount of it—almost everywhere you look ... clearly one of a kind and deeply moving.”

  —Jewish Exponent

  “I am reminded once again, having loved Searching for Bobby Fischer, how terrifically gifted a writer Fred Waitzkin is. His new book is both deeply moving and joyous, both dark and celebratory.”

  —Anita Shreve

  “When Fred Waitzkin was younger, he thought he had it in him to be a great writer. He was right. This memoir of growing up is passionate, often very funny, very tender, and thoroughly engrossing. He is excruciatingly open about his family’s eccentricities. And to be at his shoulder whenever he fishes is a real adventure.”

  —Peter Jennings

  The Last Marlin

  The Story of a Family at Sea

  Fred Waitzkin

  For Stella and Abe

  Contents

  PART I

  Early Fishing

  Family Values

  De Kooning or the Blues

  Bimini Sweet Bimini

  Globe

  Baiting Fischbach

  The Ebb Tide

  PART II

  Betrayal

  Shark Fishing

  Sexy Mama

  Raw Chicken Parts

  Tail Wrapped

  Loverman

  A Fish from My Brother’s Dreams

  Stuffed Head Mounts

  Betrayal

  The Flying Gaff

  New Journalism

  The Last Marlin

  PART III

  Pushing South

  Stella’s Books

  The Ghosts of Big Tuna

  Square Grouper

  The Colombians

  I’ll Be Seeing You

  Pushing South

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PART I

  EARLY FISHING

  Family Values

  WHEN I BEGAN VISITING BIMINI AS A TEENAGER, I PASSED LONG days in the white fiberglass fighting chair on my father’s boat trolling for marlin off the pines north of the island. Even back then fishing for me was a combination of action and fantasy. With long stretches to burn between strikes, I learned to love daydreaming on the ocean. While I stared at the baits and listened to the throbbing diesels, I thought of Sexy Mama dancing topless to the thumping beat of conga drums at the Calypso Club halfway between Alicetown and Porgy Bay. I was a drummer myself and imagined her shaking her chest to my beat. I tried to seduce her with passionate slaps and rolls and then I slowed the rhythm until her movements were earthy and we were both dripping sweat. She wouldn’t let me touch her. I drummed on the armrest of the fighting chair until her shapely legs and full coffee-colored breasts faded in my mind to office buildings in midtown Manhattan, new high-risers sheathed in plate glass and glimmering with thousands of fluorescent lighting fixtures—I loved thinking about fluorescents. My dad was a lighting fixture salesman, and we were always talking about his newest deals and the finer points of selling. In the fifties there was no one in New York City landing more big fluorescent lighting jobs than my dad.

  I kept an eye on the big mackerel and bonefish baits skipping through the white water behind the boat and frequently I bounced up in the chair and pointed astern. But the dorsal fin and long sickle tail sliding off a wave or coming up behind a distant outrigger bait was usually an illusion. The wash of wake and waves churned up legions of record-breaking blue marlin and accolades I would receive on the dock at the Bimini Big Game Club or I could see myself modestly describing my latest eight-hundred-pound catch to envious fifteen-year-old buddies on Long Island.

  Then half-asleep I would glimpse a long brown shape beneath the surface forty yards astern streaking toward me and suddenly a massive head coming out right behind the boat, swinging at the mackerel. This was no fantasy. Again the marlin lifted itself out, grabbed the bait, crashed back in, throwing water like a depth charge. I struck with the big rod, my shoulders wrenched forward by a violent lurching weight, bracing against the footrest, and then after the fish’s long first run, I reeled until my right arm burned, slowly lifting the rod with my back and legs, winding on the downswing, pumping and winding while the boat backed down into the sea and I was drenched in blue water. I could hear my father’s deep cough and feel his tension and excitement behind me. “Look at him jump,” I could hear him say. “Look at him jump.” After an hour or two of lifting and cranking, this immense beast of my dreams was alongside and we were actually pulling him on board Dad’s Ebb Tide.

  The value of this curious semi-somnolent blood sport was confirmed to me by its association with Ernest Hemingway, who was, of course, my favorite writer and who, I believed, understood and enjoyed life better than anyone else. In the thirties, when Bimini was anointed sportfishing capital of the world, Hemingway lived on the island, writing and trolling for marlin and bluefin tuna. There were vast numbers of marauding sharks offshore, so many that when a large fish was hooked and slowed by the drag of the reel, it was forced to confront an impossible gauntlet of ten- and twelve-foot killers. When the marlin or tuna was finally cranked to the boat, the pioneer angler cursed his bad luck, for the trophy fish was now backbone and a dead head.

  When I first came to the island there were still tremendous numbers of sharks. I was appalled and fascinated that these powerful hunters appeared in the Gulf Stream whenever a game fish was wounded. We even watched hammerheads and tiger sharks finning along the white bathing beach or slowly moving through the clear water of the Bimini harbor. I could hardly wait to step off the boat in the late afternoon to begin preparing my rigs. In a few hours I would be chumming the water off the Game Club’s dark and rickety east dock while my father sat in the bar sipping a Scotch. I caught some big sharks from that dock. One moonless night I hooked one that started leaping—I could hear the heavy thud each time the shark slammed into the calm water. Suddenly it turned back in my direction and the shark rammed the shaky piling right bene
ath my feet. I was impelled to drop the line and run for my life, but I wanted Dad to be proud of me. I heaved on the thick line wishing he would bring his drink out here and take a look. I actually got the eight-footer onto the dock, a female blacktip, and a dozen little ones wriggled out of her. They squirmed at my feet, and in the confusion of the moment with the mother bucking and snapping at my legs, I didn’t know whether I wanted to kick the baby sharks into the water or to crush them with my shoes.

  At the Compleat Angler Hotel, where Hemingway resided much of his time on Bimini, you can see photographs of the writer holding his Tommy gun beside gargantuan dead sharks. Such was his strength and prowess as an angler that he landed the first unmutilated bluefin tuna brought to the Bimini dock. On my first trips to the island I studied photographs of boatloads of large marlin and wahoo he had landed. I thought of the waters off Bimini as Hemingway’s Garden of Plenty, a gorgeous blue world landscaped with tuna, marlin, broadbill, shark, kingfish, wahoo, cero mackerel, grouper. It was a child’s vision of immutability. Hemingway’s smile from the flying bridge of the Pilar promised limitless catches, thrilling times ahead. Bimini was a place where you could pull in fish forever, where you could troll and never grow old, where your father would never die.

  As a boy I was confused that fishing was a source of tension in our home. I believed that if we kept trolling plentiful waters, Mom and Dad would get along while we made great catches, our family would prosper and endure; but Mother wasn’t interested in dropping a line or even coming on the boat. Dad was the fisherman. She considered it boorish and brutal, a big waste of time except when she could work themes and colors of the ocean into her strange art. I kept thinking that Mom would come around. Only today at seventy-eight, when she remembers my father Abe and my brother Bill, does Mother refer to the family sport with a trace of warmth. For Stella, decline has always conferred a measure of distinction.

  Mother says that I was conceived in a house across the road from Revere Beach at the north end of Boston, where my parents lived for two months during the first year of their marriage in a cozy, bright room with a view of the ocean. Stella was twenty and had plans to write a great novel. She wanted to be by the sea, to listen to the surf as she had summers with her family in Far Rockaway. As a teenage girl Stella had been romantic and rebellious and had bridled against the provincial outlook and materialism of her immigrant parents. My mother’s father was the founder of Globe Lighting, a large fixture manufacturing plant in Brooklyn. It was important for him to show the neighbors his success. He drove a Cadillac and painted the wood in his home with gold leaf, put in taffeta drapes and Persian rugs trying to re-create Versailles. Stella was embarrassed to invite her friends over. Isadore Rosenblatt was a forceful businessman and a patriarch with a master plan for all members of his family, including his eldest daughter. But his merchant dreams were insufferable to my mother, who yearned to be an actress or a writer, something more exotic than the telephone operator job her father had in mind as her springboard into the lighting industry.

  Stella met Abe for the first time when the young manufacturers’ rep from Boston stopped by the Globe factory wearing his trench coat and felt hat. There was something mysterious and dashing about this young man. “I was struck by your father’s hypnotic eyes. I would talk to him about Emerson, Thoreau, Dickens, and he would smile and nod. I believed that he loved these writers,” she says tartly.

  We are sitting on the raised deck of her small Cape Cod home with a view of the woods at dusk. I’ve been visiting her for a few days, pressing her to tell me about Abe and Bill, and she has grown tired of it. “I don’t share your interest in nostalgia,” she declares, the past suddenly between us like an alien land. She is right. I am easily seduced by memories, comforted. Mother would prefer to begin each day with a fresh slate, like a new being. Speaking with her about our lives has been fitful; I ask her questions, she is moved to describe past events, then she becomes angry or emotional, and I resolve to leave her alone. But soon Mother can’t resist telling me something more.

  “Abe promised to take me away from New York, that we would make our own lives in New England. He could convince you of anything.”

  My father’s desire for the water was a quality Stella found attractive initially, because it played against his salesman lifestyle and materialist cravings. One day in Revere Beach Abe came across a dory in bad shape. He bought it for next to nothing. This first boat was a humble beginning for a passion that would be passed on in curious variations to his children and my children. That winter Abe worked on the little dory, sanded, painted, reinforced the stern for a little engine. But most important, he cut a hole in the center of the open boat, built up a little throne to sit on, a toilet. All my father’s relatives were amazed that no water came in the hole. Even as a young man Abe had terrible intestinal problems, cramps, diarrhea. His eyes would bulge from the pain, but he wouldn’t say a word about it. The summer before I was born, Abe and Stella rode up and down the Charles River in his dory. Abe loved the boat. It was medicine for his physical pain, a retreat from tension and his abiding anger. Stella cannot recall why he gave up the dory after one summer, and there is no photograph of the double ender, which saddens me. Abe didn’t own another boat for ten years.

  Mother realized that the marriage was a mistake from the start. She was humiliated and angry each time my father brandished her pedigree to impress his customers. Globe was one of the giants in the lighting industry, and the little New England distributors Abe cultivated from Bangor to Manchester danced on their toes in the presence of Izzy Rosenblatt’s daughter. One time Abe introduced Stella to a customer and the man inquired unctuously, “So how is your father?” Stella answered, “Fine, how is yours?” which made Abe furious. My mother has always been one to clobber her foes with words, to dazzle with hyperbole and fiction. They must have been something in the early years: my father, who believed in convention and connections, who charmed with his smile, intimidated with his big green eyes; Mother spinning tales, lashing out without regret, shocking his customers and the Boston relatives. “There was an atmosphere around his friends and family: what a coup, Abe has married the boss’s daughter. It was disgusting to me.”

  She believed that my father decided to give her a baby only to quell her restlessness and disappointment, to keep her trapped. One of his salesman buddies had counseled him, give her a handful of babies, she’ll stop complaining. Nonetheless, Abe surprised her with his caring touch as a father and she began to enjoy the life they were making together. Babies—my dad’s salesman buddy had been right on target.

  Even as a young mother Stella was resolved to make her own career. Borrowing Abe’s assertiveness she went to Filene’s basement and sold them on the idea of a radio program, Beauty Is Yours. Her weekly show began with the song “A pretty girl is like a melody ...” Stella disseminated beauty tips over the air: the best cream to use if your skin is oily, how to dress if you are underweight, choosing the perfect scarf for a pudgy face. She became the beauty sage of New England, each week answering scores of letters from adoring fans. But the show was a fiction. Stella knew next to nothing about women’s beauty products, she has never cared about such things. Over the years my mother has amused herself creating false personas, re-creating reality. She is impatient with prosaic distinctions between truths and lies.

  During the early years of the marriage my father began his own little manufacturing business, Lee Products, specializing in wiring troughs and electrical boxes. He sold his electrical enclosures throughout New England. But my father didn’t make a hit in Boston, didn’t earn any real money. Dad was not suited to be an inside guy. Abe knew that he could sell, but his little shop did not have the capability to manufacture big jobs and Dad lacked the patience to acquire more machines and hire more men, methodically to build his business. It was his style to stay out late wining and dining customers and to sleep late. Abe was frustrated, impatient to make a big success. And often he was sick, doub
led over in pain, as if fights with his dad, with whom he did not get along, and competition in the electrical business took a direct physical toll on his frail body. My first memory of my father was from the lawn of a hospital. I was two years old, standing beside my mother, who was pointing to a window two or three stories above. Dad was in the window wearing a bathrobe, waving.

  Soon after my brother was born my father moved the family to New York and took over the sales division of my grandfather’s business. This was his dream, to test his selling prowess in the big leagues, to be in a position to sell thousands of costly recessed fluorescents instead of dozens of chunky panel boxes. By all accounts my father became a tremendous success, the top commercial lighting man in the New York area. He sold the lighting for the United Nations buildings, Aqueduct Race Track, the Seagram Building, the Socony Building, Time-Life, many others. At dusk, when the Manhattan skyline began to sparkle with lights, it was my dad’s work—that’s how I saw it.

  For my mother the move to New York was high treason and she suspected that for some time her father and mine had been plotting their business association behind her back. “Abe never discussed anything. He just did it,” she says. “I was in California when he bought the house in Great Neck. No discussion. Can you imagine just buying the house without my being there? I hated Great Neck. I hated the house. It was an insult. I hid in the closet when a busybody neighbor came to visit with her husband. She came many times. I could hear her calling through the window, ‘You can’t keep hiding from us. We’re your neighbors.’”

  When I was ten or eleven my father purchased Babe Ruth’s boat from the slugger’s widow. I recall going to her apartment in the Bronx with my father to give her the check and to get the title. She was dressed in a bathrobe and stunk badly of alcohol. Garbage was piled in the kitchen. There was no cheering, no more home runs in her life. The Babe had been gone for many years.