The Last Marlin Page 3

  De Kooning or the Blues

  THE SUMMER I TURNED FIFTEEN MY FATHER CHARTERED A BOAT out of Frank Tuma’s dock in Montauk. I had dreamed of this day. We were going after broadbill swordfish, the fastest of all game fish, a seventy-mile-per-hour sprinter with freight-train-pulling power. We had to run twenty miles out before even starting to look for sword-fish. It was rough and foggy. All day the captain, a tall, rough-talking John Wayne type, rode the swaying tuna tower searching for working birds, fins and telltale color changes beneath the cold slate-colored ocean. As Dad was too weak to pull on a three- or four-hundred-pounder, I was the angler. I sat in the fighting chair, waiting, wet from spray and fog. Mom and Bill sat behind me on the engine box, whispering and giggling. They were in their own world.

  The captain eventually allowed me to join him on the lurching tower platform. He predicted that we would find a swordfish late in the afternoon, which seemed far-fetched. How could he possibly know this? While he scanned the ocean he held me transfixed with stories told with an edge of menace: a few years before, a thousand-pound mako had ripped off half the stern of his boat, they had had to bail furiously to make it back to Montauk. One time, when he was night fishing off Islamorada, a hooked sailfish, attracted by the light, had leaped aboard and speared his lady angler through the chest, killed her. The captain had learned a lesson from this: when night fishing he would try to keep his cockpit light off.

  If we found a broadbill, he told me, we would let it eat the bait for a full minute, maybe longer. Broadbills have soft mouths. If you hook one in the mouth, the hook almost always pulls out. We wanted it hooked deep in the belly. I nodded, deep in the belly. All the while he glared at the water. Hours passed, no fish. I worried that the day would end. When would I ever get another chance like this? Soon I would be back on the Great Neck Estates floating dock dropping down sandworms for eels.

  A half hour before we had to turn back, the man tensed, focused on a far-off patch of ocean. He hissed for me to go down, get into the chair. I couldn’t see a thing and told him so. When he turned toward me I thought he was going to throw me off the tower.

  From below I could see that he was tracking something, like a hunter in the woods, the boat just idling ahead. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, behind the boat, I spotted a tall fin clipping the rough sea like a ragged stick. I was harnessed now to a heavy rod and reel, which was in free spool so the fish would feel no pressure when it mouthed the bait. The boat was dead in the water. The mate spoke to me in hushed tones as though I would soon endure the greatest test of a lifetime. I was very nervous. How had the captain known we would find one in the late afternoon?

  Line began jerking off my huge reel. The mate reminded me to let him eat for a minute. Soon the fish was running with it and in no time a couple of hundred yards were off the spool. I was afraid that I would lose it all. It was like the moment in the movies when they say not to fire until you can see the whites of their eyes. I recall the mate telling me to strike, and then I hefted up the pole maybe a foot and came up against a wall of resistance. I tried again to set the hook. I remember only fragments of the fight. The captain charged after the streaking jumping fish, the engine roared, the captain and mate cursed, yelled orders back and forth. The mate helped me lift the rod and wind the reel and said that I was doing a great job.

  Eventually the fish tired and I could see him close beneath the waves, long as a skiff and colored radiant purple, who could even imagine capturing such a creature? With each pump of the rod and wind of the reel I pulled him two feet closer. I remember Mother clenching her fist and closing her eyes, praying for my swordfish to get off the line. I screamed at her to stop doing this. About forty-five minutes after we hooked it, the eleven-foot fish was stone-cold dead on the deck and quickly turned black; the captain was smiling broadly and shaking my hand.

  It was hard to find our way back in the fog. A half-dozen boats stayed close to us as though sharing a piece of our glory. Three hours later we weighed in the 309-pounder at Tuma’s dock while Yul Brynner and Eli Wallach stood by gaping with jealousy—they had been skunked that afternoon. My mother gave me a big hug. I remember this because it was so unusual. Mother had become afraid of the passion she felt for her sons after reading in a psychology text that kissing and hugging little boys might create Oedipal problems later, but she bent to the fervor of the hour. Maybe for a moment or two she wondered if she had been wrong about fishing.

  Nonetheless, subsequent fishing trips were marred by Mother’s reluctance to come out in the boat. At the last minute she would persuade us to take her to Robert Motherwell’s studio in East Hampton where de Kooning was painting and also working with a few students. The twenty-mile drive often meant that we would miss the tide. We would be arriving at the Point in the Richardson after the other boats had already filled their boxes with blues and the fishing had turned slack. During dinners at the club we would be talking about the action off the point or a big mako or broadbill that had been landed by one of the forty-footers, and Mother would interrupt the flow with something de Kooning had said about her watercolors. She confided to me that he was a giant, he had eyes that penetrated your soul. Her adulation rankled me. I am sure that her distaste for my fishing life spurred me on.

  I wanted to be great, but the path was not always easy. One afternoon, without mentioning it to the owner, my brother and I borrowed a skiff that was tied up at the Yacht Club’s small boat dock. There were ten- and fifteen-pound fluke running just outside the Montauk jetties, locals called them “doormats.” I had asked a pretty girl to come along with us, and a friend, Jon Lehman. I wanted to show them what a real fisherman could do. After catching my broadbill I was swelling with fishing pride and impatient to take my place in the inner circle of Montauk captains. But it was rougher than I anticipated in the bay and soon our overloaded boat was taking waves over the side. I cursed the little boat and kept pushing for the jetties. I was determined to show this lovely girl how to catch doormats. It was amazing to me how quickly the boat filled with bay water. I watched us sink in disbelief. Seconds after the engine sputtered to a stop, the boat flipped over. We were holding on to the slippery bottom for life, waving at runabouts that were planing in the distance. When no one turned our way Jon and the girl swam to shore for help. Bill still couldn’t swim and a few times he lost his grip and paddled weakly while I tried to keep a hand on him. Once again, near to drowning, my brother stuck out his jaw and seemed prepared to accept his fate. Death was never the concern to Bill that it has been for me.

  Even before a cruiser came alongside and hauled us from the chilly water, I was wrestling with my shortcomings as a skipper. My father drank all night in the crew’s bar and accepted consolation from the captains and mates I admired so much. This was a terrible humiliation. Mother was as oblivious to this newest sea disaster as she had been to the last one. But other than her disinterest there was no retreat from the gossip of boat stealing and bad seamanship.

  One afternoon Mother was folding sheets in the Laundromat in East Hampton when de Kooning came in with Jackson Pollock. By way of introduction de Kooning told Pollock that she was a painter, spending time in Montauk fishing with her family, and Pollock invited her to come by his home. Stella drove to Springs and found Pollock drinking beer in his barn in the early afternoon. She was surprised that he wasn’t working. If she didn’t paint for even one day, Mother was afflicted by guilt.

  Stella had brought a gift of some bluefish we had caught the day before off the point and Pollock was delighted. “Why don’t you bring your boat to Springs and we’ll do some fishing,” he suggested. Oh great, she thought, Jackson Pollock and Abe hip to hip in the stern jigging for blues.

  Pollock showed her his recent drip paintings on large sheets of glass and then they talked for hours about the New York art scene. He was concerned what New York artists were saying about his work and pressed Stella for opinions and information.

  In the fifties New York artists were often j
ealous about rising reputations and who was getting credit for various stylistic breakthroughs. Hans Hofmann claimed that he was the first to use the drip method. Others said that it was Pollock. The critic Harold Rosenberg had recently been extolling de Kooning as the greatest painter of the day and others were saying that Pollock’s run as an innovator was over. His rise had been meteoric but now he felt supplanted and was depressed and drinking much of the time. When Mother mentioned these issues to me I became angry. Who cares who dripped paint first or whether Kline’s black lines were more important than de Kooning’s tortured women? She spoke of de Kooning and Pollock like gods. I kept thinking that my mother was temporarily sidetracked and waited impatiently for her return to normalcy. I knew that she could paint realistically if she wanted to. I tried to reason with her about her art and she laughed at me. I couldn’t imagine why she persisted in this awful style.

  I felt bad for my father. How could he put up with abstract painting and Mother’s oddball friends? Her rebelliousness was galling. Why was she so oblivious to his success? He was selling more commercial lighting than any other five salesmen in the city. He hobnobbed with electrical distributors like Maxi Kamins, Sauli Schniderman and Harry Fischbach—the giants of the industry. Dad was lighting the sky with recessed fluorescents. Some of them were manufactured with his own invention called the “miracle hinge.” When he walked into posh midtown restaurants Dad didn’t even need to order: maître d’s knew his favorite dishes. I was so proud of him. When he was away selling in Cleveland or Detroit, I would smell the shoes in his closet, the sheets on his bed.

  From time to time Mother hinted that she would leave him. She would remark gravely, “I want you to be prepared.” I thought that she was saying this just to torture me—that the problems were between her and me. It was my job to argue with her, to appease her. Dad was above this strife, selling. We were so close to getting the forty-footer.

  Mother wouldn’t mention divorce for a month or two and I would become convinced that it had gone away. She was content to paint in her studio. She played the records of George Shearing and Cal Tjader, urged me to drum along on my congas. She brought me Tito Puente records. I beat along on the timbales, which made her happy. I rapped out rhythms on the cowbell while she danced in the living room in her leotard. Her earthy dancing made me uneasy but I went along with it. She gave me Camus to read, urged me to write stories like him. I agreed, but secretly I knew that I would be a salesman, Mother would stay married, we would get the forty-footer.

  Bimini Sweet Bimini

  UNLESS MY MEMORY DECEIVES ME THE FINE DOCKS AND SHADED cottages at the Big Game Club have hardly changed. At night the surface of the original kidney-shaped pool still shimmers with lights; palm trees rustle in the breeze, and the sea-scented air fills me with longing as it did when I first came here. As a teenager on Bimini I would notice prim and proper secretaries from Miami and Orlando bound off the Chalk’s seaplane hungry for piña coladas, the mandatory prelude to the weekend hunt for black lovers. On Sunday afternoon before the last flight out, the white ladies strolled the waterfront with their muscled conch fishermen as though love had forever conquered social convention. I glance at the pool now and recall sultry nights spanning four decades watching nude ladies frolic in the shallow water. On this tiny island even the most conventional folk feel the license to throw off their clothes. One late night I was drawn to the pool by the howling of island dogs. As I sat spellbound in the shadows I watched a federal prosecutor who’d been a player in a big obscenity trial fornicate with his girlfriend in the shallow end as she sipped tequila and threw back her lovely neck and said in a southern drawl, “To killya.”

  On Bimini time slows down, becomes layered and thick. It’s hard to connect the moments to specific years. Take a skiff ride from the Game Club up to Porgy Bay, running between the broken stakes that mark the green inside channel, past little mountains of ancient conch shells, past Ansil Saunders’s wooden boat ramp, then head north beside the baseball field where Jackson Ellis hit his Homeric blast, bonefish flats spreading east and south for miles. The channel veers close to shore beside the dump, somehow aromatic when they burn Bimini garbage, the smoke marking the direction of the wind and determining which way the offshore boats will head in the morning. The channel passes the power plant, the A&A liquor supply where I once stopped to give Isaac three plump strawberry groupers in return for a half-dozen lobster tails. Now the route isn’t marked, but I can find my way by sticking to the green water that runs deep right up against the flats; past Charlie Rolle’s cinder-block factory, out of business because Charlie’s blocks were too sandy (homes built with these blocks might crumble in a big blow); recalling a time when the island was overrun with howling, emaciated dogs and a guy in Porgy Bay carried a half-dozen of them out in his skiff along with six of Charlie’s blocks, tied a block with a length of rope to a front leg of each of the dogs, and pushed them over one at a time as though he were setting channel markers. The dogs bloated and with their genitals engorged and bobbing up and down like buoys in the current, they marked this part of the channel for weeks (for some reason the sharks left them alone); next we come alongside Charlie’s little rental cottages in Porgy Bay. I had loaned him the money to finish building one of them twenty-five years ago, and in return he had let me live there for three summers when I was fishing for marlin with my wife Bonnie out of a twenty-foot open boat and Minnie Davis was taking care of our son Josh. We ride past the decrepit dock and little cottage where Craig Tenant lived on the thirty-two-foot Pacemaker he ran for Judy Hammond. He became my closest friend. Craig had traveled to Bimini seeking adventure and a new lease on life. His exploits, along with those of a few other expatriates living in rustic Porgy Bay, would change the character of Bimini to this day; although, cruising north from the Game Club along the inside channel, the island looks remarkably as it did in the home movie my dad shot running up this lovely waterway in a skiff when I was fifteen.

  “It was Abe’s dream to pull up at a fancy marina with a big boat,” says my mother. “He wanted to make a statement: Do you know who I am? I’m not some jerk. I’m Abe Waitzkin. I once said to him, ‘Abe, you’re so tense. I think you should pump gas for a living.’ I thought pumping gas was sexy. But Abe became furious and told his sister Celia what I’d said. ‘She wants me to be a gas station attendant. Abe Waitzkin!’” After so many years living alone in her house on Martha’s Vineyard Island, making sculpture, Stella remains angry with Abe. She can’t give it up or doesn’t want to. When she lashes into him I become a kid again, feeling the need to defend my father. “Abe is so conventional,” she used to say to me, “a lighting fixture salesman ...”

  What did my mother know about the art of selling? She never listened to him, didn’t care. I listened. He was as much a master of timing and mood as George Shearing or Dizzy Gillespie. He knew when to cool it or exactly the moment to tighten the screws. He would call a contractor on the phone and speak softly about illness in the man’s family, fishing for cod off the Boston lightship, or the deer that grazed on the contractor’s wooded back lawn in New Jersey. A sweet deal was hanging in the air, but Dad wouldn’t touch it. Not yet. Sitting next to him I would ache—why doesn’t he pull the trigger? Dad might even sound offended by the crassness of selling panel boxes. We’ll fish together in the islands, he’d romance his customer .... How is your daughter?... Terrible what that guy did to her ... Prick bastard ... Don’t worry, we’ll all go out in the boat.... There was always a subliminal dialogue and both men listened like hounds. Businessmen positioning themselves while musing about their declining sex drives or the terrible fire at the Cocoanut Grove that had killed Abe’s cousin. Before hanging up the receiver Dad ruefully accepted a fifty-thousand-dollar job for Lee Products, work to keep the Boston shop busy for three months. Beautiful. He waited until he could see the whites of their eyes.

  Abe’s warmth and friendship were legend in the trade. Wives played second fiddle as Dad wined and dined his
buddies, hatching grand plans for high-risers in Chicago and fishing trips in Puerto Rico. When the water was calm he guided tough guys to unexpected moments of empathy and caring. More than his lighting fixtures, more than Globe or Lee, my father became his own product. Along with profit, camaraderie was the payoff for a big order faithfully executed with Abe. I watched in awe, loaned him to his contractors and union guys for a night or a week. Even while I yearned for my father to come home to go fishing or to watch me play softball, I loved imagining his dinners in distant nightclubs with Maxi Kamins, who was Danny Kaye’s brother, and Sauli Schniderman, or their fierce joy sitting at the fights in Philadelphia; there were legendary moments, such as the night that the great light-heavyweight champ, Harold Johnson, was drugged and lost to the plodding Julio Mederos. Dad was there ringside making a deal with Billy Blieman. Unable to sleep in my bed, I watched him walking through airports with his briefcase fat with orders. He was coming home to me.