The Last Marlin Read online

  By now Dad had taken a job selling for Ruby-Philite, one of his former competitors. Ruby was less than half the size of Globe, but it was a nice-looking factory with its own luncheonette and automated spray booths. Ruby seemed like a company ready to make a move. Dad came on board wearing his Richard Widmark hat and razzmatazz smile. He installed his secretary Kate in the biggest office and came in one afternoon with a couple million dollars’ worth of business. Abe was back. No other salesman in town could touch him. He brought the works. Restaurants. Prizefights. He was buddies now with Charlie Goldman, who was Rocky Marcianos trainer. How could we miss with the champ in our corner?

  Dad confided in me that some of the first orders for Ruby were deals he had closed months earlier for Globe before he had been fired. When I asked how he had managed this magic, he gave me his slow Mafia nod, very theatrical. But why had my grandfather allowed Dad to take back business that was already in I.R.’s shop? Fuck the old bastard, said my father. He pointed his finger down the road.

  Dad had arranged to have the Ebb Tide delivered to Montauk about a month after Mom moved out of the house. A new guy was running her, someone Dad had met in the greasy breakfast place across from Gosman’s dock. Dad could never afford one of the thoroughbred captains who won tournaments for millionaire boat owners at the Montauk Yacht Club and the Bimini Big Game. He would usually hire someone for a day or a week who was on his way down, usually a drunk. Employing a captain was important for Dad, and he trusted these men even if they were sick and reeking from booze. I liked to steer the boat, but when we got to the Yacht Club Dad wanted his skipper on the bridge—maybe he was thinking about my past history at the helm. If the man was sleeping it off down below, Dad would wake him to bring the Ebb Tide into her slip. For nearly all the years we owned her, he wouldn’t let me bring her in.

  Twenty miles east of Montauk Point the Ebb Tide was loping across soft pillows of summer ocean. Abe smiled and smoked a Lucky, looked down from the flying bridge at his boys. We were out shark fishing. Bill always wanted to fish for sharks.

  My brother loved being offshore. He closed his eyes and soaked up the sun. Bill’s Siamese cats slinked into the cockpit. They were alarmed by seagulls and hid beneath the fighting chairs until the coast was clear to make a clamorous dash for the salon. Bill giggled at the chaos of his cats, would not hear of fishing without them, and Dad went along with it. Issues between them were set aside on the boat.

  When we fished out of Montauk I was usually in the tower searching for finning swordfish to bait. Out here all of my dreads seemed preposterous. On a clear, calm day I could see for miles and the abundance of big fish was intoxicating. In all directions there were finning sharks and schools of small tunas crashing bait beneath flocks of frenzied birds; often there were killer whales feeding on tuna and giant sunfish with a floppy fin that I would almost always mistake for the dorsal of a broadbill. From time to time I saw a school of giant bluefin tuna, six- and eight-hundred-pounders pushing waves of water like minitankers, heading north for the Cape.

  Some afternoons the ocean was littered with kegs churning through the gray water, each of them tethered to a three- or four-hundred-pound swordfish, occasionally an eight-hundred-pounder, harpooned by one of the New Bedford “stick boats.” Whenever we came across kegs there were meandering blue sharks around, although for the most part the sharks gave the harpooned swordfish a wide berth. When they got around to it, the stick boats put over dories to retrieve the kegs, which were supposed to tire out the fish, but in fact big swordfish still had a lot of fight left and the men in the dories had their hands full pulling them in.

  In these waters white marlin were also common and the stick boats sometimes harpooned these sixty-pounders just for fun. They called them “skilly gillies” and these skinny fish leaped and skittered across the surface, trying to shake off the deadly stick. Some of the sportfishing guys thought that it was a shame the commercial fishermen killed them for nothing. But there were so many marlin back then, no one made an issue of it.

  With all of the splendid game fish to choose from, we were heading past the swordfish boats looking for makos. Bill dreamed about sharks.

  My baby brother was drawn to peril and pain. There was a game we sometimes played on the Ebb Tide. Two guys each take an end of a length of ten- or fifteen-pound-test monofilament line and wrap it around a finger. Both start slowly to pull away. As the pressure increases, the mono begins to cut into the skin. Who could take it longest? Bill played this game against all of Dad’s tough captains, and I never saw him give in. With his finger ringed in blood he would keep pulling away. More than once I wrestled his arm forward when I feared that he would sever the finger. But my brother was amused by my fears. Taking chances had become his teenage credo and handling sharks was also part of that.

  Bill was mesmerized by stories fishermen told about thousand-pound makos attacking boats or long-dead carcasses on the deck suddenly leaping with open fangs upon a careless fisherman. One old harpooner warned my brother that whenever you stuck a mako, it would turn back upon the line and bite itself free, as if the shark had an ominous intelligence. He told Bill about the severed head of a mako that had made a crippling attack on a friend of his, took the man’s hand off. He cautioned us never to put one in the boat without first shooting it in the head with a shotgun.

  After running about two hours from Montauk, Bill signaled that we had arrived at the right spot in the Atlantic. In a few moments the droning of the engines gave way to silent rocking and the heat of the afternoon. My world became the sound of my brother ladling cups of chum into the ocean, ground mossbunker, sometimes he mixed it with seawater until he had the consistency just right. From time to time he took a whole fish and sliced off a couple of chunks and threw this into the oily slick. The sun flashed against his blade. By now the cats had grown more bold. The stench of the mossbunker had lured them into the sun-drenched stern. They stood on their hind legs mewing and trying to reach the putrid brew. The slick had drifted way behind the boat, maybe a mile. Soon Bill went into the cooler and took a bottle of rotting chicken blood, poured some of that overboard. Seagulls dove into the mess.

  My brother was a witch doctor. A chicken wing, some blood, feathers, mossbunker guts. The proper timing and mixture were essential. He ladled over the foul slop for a great white, but secretly he hoped for a Carcharodon megalodon. Bill was dangling his hooks into an ancient ocean. He didn’t speak much.

  The darkness of the cold water compounded the mystery of our waiting. They were coming, but when? How many? How big? The slick connected us to unlimited bounty, and when fins eventually began working up the slick toward the Ebb Tide, it seemed inevitable, a natural law yielding to our call. They were blue sharks, sloppy swimmers, dumb and groping for tidbits of chum. Soon a half-dozen were feeding off the stern. Wow, Dad said, looking over the side at the ten- and twelve-foot brutes that slid beneath the boat and suddenly reappeared from under the transom mouthing chunks of chum and blood.

  After ten minutes the blue sharks disappeared. Why? Maybe something had scared them. Something fierce and huge. But there was nothing. Very quiet. Even the birds were gone. The tide had stopped running now and the Ebb Tide rested in a fetid pool of blood and rotten mossbunker. The wind was still and there wasn’t a ripple on the ocean. Then something grabbed one of the baits. We never saw a fin or swirl in the slick. My brother was on the rod and leaned back heavily to sink the hook. But there was no pressure and it seemed as though the fish had let go. Bill cranked slack line and then after fifteen or twenty seconds the ocean opened behind the Ebb Tide and a tremendous mako came out of the water, a projectile of muscle. The tail of the shark was fifteen feet above the surface—I’d never seen any fish jump like that. Hanging above us the six-hundred-pounder flipped over and showed us rows of menacing teeth and a beady eye. Then he crashed back on his side and showered us with water. Bill fought that shark for five hours. Pumped and cranked. Sweated. We could have taken him much fa
ster, but each time the shark came close, instead of backing up to the fish Dad’s half-soused captain idled the Ebb Tide ahead. He was afraid of that big mako, and so was I. The captain ran away from the shark a dozen times and Bill cursed the skipper and wound the shark back to the boat. By the time we had the mako alongside, I think it had been dead in the water for an hour. For Bill, catching the mako was tainted by our lack of courage.

  In the late fifties fishermen went after sharks with a spirit of vengeance and payback. Stories of downed airmen in the Pacific being slaughtered by man-eaters were still fresh and inspired anglers to kill sharks in droves. A few charter skippers such as Frank Mundus made hay inflaming the passion of clients for killing sharks, bringing in boatloads. Mundus, who inspired the captain in Peter Benchley’s Jaws, ran the Ebb Tide for a few days and made a strong impression on Dad, who decided that killing sharks was a form of missionary work.

  One fall afternoon we were fishing off Montauk Point with a crony of Mundus’s on the bridge. Bill wasn’t aboard that chilly day, and for hours there seemed to be no more sharks off Montauk. But once they came, they were thick, really thick. I was ladling the chum into the water and fifteen or twenty two- and three-hundred-pounders were feeding off the stern like dogs. One of Dad’s friends was fighting one on a rod, and I never noticed when the captain came off the bridge with a rifle. He opened up on the sharks with a 30.06, shot them in the head, the belly. The white bellies of dying sharks mixed with blood and soon a dozen of them were twisting in the pink froth, biting each other’s tails and faces while the captain kept blasting away. When he began firing, I didn’t know if the killing was great or horrifying, but eventually with my ears ringing I told the man to stop shooting. I was surprised and a little embarrassed when he obeyed me. I turned to my father then and saw his appalled expression, as though I had crossed him in front of his buddies.

  My brother had no interest in slaughtering sharks. But he loved to chum for them and dreamed about three-thousand-pound makos and the Carcharodon megalodon. At the Yacht Club Bill cut open sharks that had been caught by other boats and left to rot on the dock, searched their entrails to discover what they had been eating. The cats licked huge shark livers, mewed, and Bill laughed at them and rubbed their ears with his bloody hands. He cut the jaws out of makos and tiger sharks and hung them to dry on pilings where the gulls swooped in on them. In the shallows near the club, Billy played with baby sand sharks, rolled them over and patted their white bellies. When he found small sharks on the dock, he sometimes saved them in jars of formaldehyde that he stored in Riverdale on top of his bureau beneath his collection of lacquered shark jaws.

  One afternoon when Dad was off doing business, Bill and I and a captain, Cliff North, were crossing from Block Island to Point Judith, Rhode Island. The fog was so thick we could barely see the bow of the boat from the bridge. Cliff was a top Florida skipper in between jobs who was willing to work cheap for Abe for a short period. But he had never seen fog socked in like this and was spooked. This was before the days of depth recorders, loran and satellite navigation. We were navigating with a compass and watch. Cliff didn’t know the currents around Block Island. We were lost. Cliff shut her down, scratched his head and studied the chart. The boat was rolling in a cross sea and from below she must have looked like the belly of a wounded whale. “I don’t know, Buddy,” said Cliff, looking at the chart. He always called me “Buddy.” All of a sudden the twenty-ton Ebb Tide lifted from the water and began to shake. What the hell? Something big had us and was turning and ripping. I held on, thinking about the giant squid that pulled the Cosello brothers down in their forty-footer off the coast of Chile. After ten or fifteen seconds the Ebb Tide sat back on the sea. Fog or no fog we knew we better get out of there fast. During the trip to Point Judith the wounded boat vibrated badly and my brother had this ecstatic expression, which was infuriating to Cliff. He was a very straight guy. The following day we hauled her in the boatyard. There were a dozen broken teeth sticking into the hull, which was torn up pretty bad where we had been hit. It had been a white shark, maybe two thousand or twenty-five hundred pounds. Bill insisted that we had been attacked by an eighty-foot Carcharodon megalodon. He was always hoping, searching the ocean for six-foot dorsal fins.

  Dad forgave my exodus from the Great Neck house without a word of reproach. We talked regularly on the phone, met in the city for meals. He told me about new jobs he was working on and memorable dinners at Lüchow’s with Maxi Kamins and Charlie Zweifel. I often thought of Abe and the Commissioner sitting in fine dark brown leather chairs eating New York sirloin at the St. Moritz. Sometimes Dad drove me to the new factory and we looked at blueprints of office buildings, showed me where all the fixtures would go. Some would be ceiling-mounted, others stem-mounted. It always seemed like a serious matter which mounting style a contractor would choose for his fluorescents. To me and Kate and Dad it was as though they put up the sleek glassy high-risers to buy our fixtures. I walked through the factory watching new eight-footers come hot off the line. At Ruby there was no distraction with residential lighting. The company was putting on new guys to fill Dad’s orders and was becoming a real player in the commercial lighting industry.

  Dad was having a little problem with his throat, no big deal, he said. But the hoarseness wouldn’t go away. His buddies at the Clinic said it was nothing to worry about but he needed to do a little therapy. A couple of times a month he flew to Boston to have radiation treatment. Once I went with him. The doctors gathered around Abe like he was a treasure. They asked about the boat and the fixture business. Dad smiled thankfully. Without his shirt he looked so needy. Before he took his turn in front of the machine, a big-breasted woman was having her treatment. She seemed confused about why I was there watching. But I was the least of her worries and she smiled briefly and put me out of her mind.

  Mother dripped paint and turpentine all over the new parquet floors of our Riverdale apartment. Smears of gray, blue and green from wet canvases on the leather seats of the Chevy, a shame, but she didn’t care. She urged me to dress in black, be subterranean, make your own statement. Whatever that meant. Her friends Sam Goodman and Boris Lurie made sculptures of shit. Long turds, small constipated balls of shit, clumps of diarrhea realistically colored and textured. You could practically smell it. Mother threw this great art in my face, dragged me to the gala gallery opening of the Shit Show. She took me to the Five Spot to hear Ornette Coleman. The sax and trumpet played without melody or warmth. They devoured one another. Great theater to her was Beckett and Ionesco. I found these writers intriguing but also frightening. In their sparse upside-down worlds I could not find any place for guys like me and Dad and the contractors we both admired. And what good was all of this great art doing her? In her Riverdale bedroom Mother slept amid stacks of abstract sketches and unpaid bills. Without Abe the details of life overwhelmed her.

  I cultivated my conventional side. I went for haircuts, bought black penny loafers and two business suits on Fordham Road in the Bronx. I learned from Dad how to tie a fat double Windsor knot on my tie. I taught the knot to one of my friends and soon all the Barnard boys were wearing the double Windsor. I dedicated myself to getting good grades and prided myself on push-ups. Whenever I visited Dad I reeled off thirty fast ones and then stopped as though I had fifty more in me. Watching me do push-ups seemed to give him vitality. Sometimes he would smack me in the shoulder as though roughhousing would follow. Out of the blue he would ask, What’s with your mother? I shrugged. We never had a long conversation about her.

  In my Riverdale life I worried about asking girls for dates and fretted that my religious devotion was getting away from me. I worked on my basketball skills. Every day after school I shot for three or four hours on the hoop behind our building with Ronnie Penn, who was star of the varsity. Ronnie liked my shot but said that I had to push myself to be more physical: use your body, Waitz, go to the boards, follow your shot, follow your shot! I counted the days until the start of
the season. On the first day of practice I was cut from the Barnard Junior Varsity. Almost forty years later I still feel the need to explain. In the first scrimmage I was guarding David Bloomberg, the leading scorer for the JV. I reached in for the ball and he fell to the court holding his arm. Maybe I fouled him but I don’t recall much contact. The next day he came into school wearing a cast and I was off the team.

  Mother and Dad warred within me. She bought me a subscription membership to the Living Theater, where I attended curious performances of Judith Malina and Julian Beck. During intermission I stood with folded arms as though deeply into existential thought. Sometimes Mother introduced me to her artist friends as a writer. When we were alone I fumed at her that I had never written a thing and had other career plans. Writing is your destiny, she said smugly, and reminded me that at eleven I had composed a brilliant story called “My Family,” in which I documented her fiasco with Gus Verner, the grocer whom Mother tried to transform into an abstract expressionist. I suppose that Mother’s steady diatribe on the banality and decadence of suburbia had taken hold because in a few short months Great Neck was sliding into my distant past. I went out to visit Dad less often.