The Last Marlin Read online

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  Mutual trust is the key to selling, Dad told me. The pact between business friends was sacred, and unless someone gave him a real screwing Dad was faithful as a monk. He worried about his buddies. He brought home their concerns and was pained when a successful salesman or manufacturer was down on his luck. Dad rarely turned down a friend who needed a favor, loaned money even when he was short. But his specialty was health, and in this regard he always came through. The biggest contractors in the lighting industry came to Dad with their medical problems. Abe had connections with the top stomach guys at a distinguished research hospital in Boston that he warmly referred to as “the Clinic.” Dad frequently invited surgeons from the Clinic out in his boat. The doctors fell in love with Abe. They found it exciting to talk with him about business deals.

  Probably because he had survived many close calls himself, it seemed to his customers, as it did to me, Dad had inside information about life and death. He frequently booked friends into the Clinic, for surgery, mostly abdominal operations. When Abe picked up the phone and called the hospital, there was no waiting time for major surgery. One time he told me that even the British prime minister, Anthony Eden, had to wait his turn for a stomach operation at the Clinic while Dad and his customers were always moved promptly to the top of the list. Dad had a way of talking about major surgery as though it was only slightly less onerous than time spent in resorts like the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, where he liked to entertain his customers. Most contractors seemed to have stomach problems, and Dad had it down to routine: It’s not so rough, I can recall him saying on the phone. He calmed them, pointed out that he had been through much worse, and booked them into the Clinic. Years later several of Dad’s customers complained of losing feet of intestine, or in one instance a stomach, when it wasn’t necessary. I don’t know if this is true or not. What is clear, without question, is that Dad eased their fears. They believed in him and he landed the orders.

  But occasionally contractors said no to Dad, and then the change in him was fast and stunning. Abe’s face blistered with rage as if he’d been pelted by deceit and betrayal, his thin arms and legs gained strength from some desperate source. He forced his spindly frame through the closing door. He vented fury with spittle on his lip, choked on his cigarette smoke, spit into a handkerchief, came up running. Who could face down this emaciated man with huge damning eyes? Defeat was no option. He knew the vulnerabilities of his customers, his buddies, after all, and, if it came to that, Abe Waitzkin’s revenge would be unfettered by remorse.

  Perhaps even more than reprisal, I think it was Dad’s style that won losing games. Abe recognized that power could be gleaned from a weakened body—this frail vessel pushed by a whirlwind of fury to be on top, to close the deal. At any second Abe might tear apart, literally split a gut. But he held the pedal to the floor, always took the dare. Dad had no fear of imploding, of vessels bursting his brain, of dying. But more to the point, he knew how to use illness and the specter of his demise—whatever it took. When Dad finally wrote up the order, his ravished customer was so relieved to be free of Abe’s tension and blackmail, for life to continue as before. They called him “Transfusion” in the trade because of his chicken-bone arms and legs, his near-to-death bearing. Imagine, “Transfusion.” The name humiliated my mother, but Dad grinned, rolled and clicked the false teeth in his mouth.

  The winter after my first swordfish, we flew to Miami. “Abe heard about this little island, Bimini, from one of his gangster friends,” says Mother. “He would have been happy to keep going to the Fontainebleau in Miami. He didn’t like blacks. He said they smelled, except for Dizzy Gillespie. One time at a club Dizzy stopped by Abe’s table. After this, Abe called Dizzy his friend.” Whenever Mother referred to Dad’s friends in the business as gangsters, I became enraged. This aspersion impugned his art. She insinuated that Dad landed so many big deals for Globe Lighting because he arranged kickbacks to electrical contractors or bribed city commissioners or union big shots. She was only guessing. She would say anything against him. But in this instance the haggard man who told us about Bimini had recently come out of jail for some unexplained offense.

  In Miami we visited the man’s lighting fixture plant. It was boarded up, with weeds growing between cracks in the cement in the parking lot and loading bays. There were three or four abandoned forklifts with tires melted by the sun. This sorry state must have been related to his jail time. While we walked through the hot, empty factory, Dad and I agreed wordlessly that this was a shame, a tragedy. The plant must have been 125,000 square feet. I could almost hear the crack of spot welders, the crunch of the ten-thousand-pound automated shear that had once bent ten-foot sheets of eighteen-gauge steel like cardboard. Cut into the floor there was an empty concrete pool littered with debris. Such a waste. I knew the sharp pungent smell of the degreasing tank when it bubbled with cleaning solvent. I had grown up around the sights and smells of factories, and to me they were the good earth. I took pride in my knowledge of the names and proper placement of heavy machines. Dad and I had often talked about the best layout for a plant, moving presses and lathes in our heads like rooks and knights in a chess variation. I envisioned big commercial jobs rolling toward the loading bays, belted bunches of fixtures on forklifts, the enamel still sweet-smelling and warm from the oven. Oddly enough, Mother also enjoyed the acrid smell of a lighting fixture plant. She paused to admire the huge conveyor-belted oven that had once been used to bake white and gray enamel on eight-footers. She observed that the oven would be perfect for melting glass into sculpture. The man had smiled sadly at this and mopped his brow with a handkerchief.

  Later, we relaxed with the manufacturer on his hundred-foot yacht that had also fallen into neglect. In the salon the varnish had blistered and there was a dank, moldy smell like unwashed sheets. He and his wife lived on board. She was in a bathrobe, sipped her drink, occasionally mumbled something. He paid no attention to her.

  While they drank Scotch, the manufacturer confided to Dad that he had to “get back on his feet.” Abe was supportive, threw an arm across the man’s shoulder. They began to talk about the lighting business, trading guys they knew who had closed deals for Lightolier, Neo-Ray or Ruby-Philite. I loved this shoptalk; just the names of these great firms gave me goose bumps. Behind all their palaver was the fact that Dad ran the commercial division of Globe. In the industry “Globe” was a name that filled men with awe. Dad assured the haggard man that soon he would have his welders and presses operating again. Who knows, maybe he could subcontract a deal for Globe. The possibility of doing business with my grandfather’s company hit this battered man like adrenaline. Next thing he was speaking about getting new batteries for his yacht, varnishing the mahogany, taking her to the Bahamas.

  We stood on the foredeck of the hundred-footer, tied up on the intracoastal directly across from the Fontainebleau Hotel. The new hotel’s galaxy of shining windows lit the Miami night with glamour and promise. It was a monument to my father’s dreams. Dad was smiling, feeling great. The strains of a poolside rumba band carried our way on a soft breeze and seemed to suffuse my mother, who closed her eyes and moved her shoulders to the beat. The next morning we took our first trip to Bimini.

  We stayed at the Big Game Club in one of the original cottages on the north end, near the old Lerner Marine Laboratory. From our porch we watched large hammerheads and tiger sharks circling in dockside pens. Mother immediately began painting watercolors of pelicans on the pilings. Her colors were softer than in New York, but I could not find any pelicans in them. Bill loved these paintings. With a little rod he dropped his line for grunts and snappers. Stella didn’t mind his colorful little fish. She considered them ethereal and otherworldly, connected to his unusual fantasy life and love for ancient creatures.

  Mother complicated my more conventional big game fantasies by pointing out the stunning women wearing tight pants and stiletto heels who appeared magically on the island each afternoon with the seaplane from Miami. In t
he evening they walked slowly down the dock, gift-wrapped and thrilling, languorously swinging their hips, seeming to select yachts to board like chocolates from a box. Mother was amused by my gaping adolescent sexuality and Great Neck values. One day she introduced me to a gangly man in a cowboy shirt and hat whom she met outside the Compleat Angler Hotel. He was a past bull-wrestling champion of the United States. His ribs and shoulder were broken, and he was on the island recovering for a month before returning to the rodeo circuit. When she felt that I was duly impressed, she mentioned that he was sharing a room in the Compleat Angler with his boyfriend.

  Mother was always on the lookout for Bohemian life choices, ragged edges, blotches on pretty faces. She loved all floundering souls. She would call reprobates and underachievers “great artists,” which was confusing to me. Most merchants and professionals, in her view, were losers. Mother took pleasure in Bimini’s underside, the whores, the drunks. She was captivated by the rusting refrigerators and propane tanks that were unceremoniously dumped on the North Beach by the diaphanous blue water, called them “sculpture.” When I objected, she said that I was blind and ordered me to look again.

  Mother noticed that Bimini had an appeal that was only tangential to big game fishing. This spit of sand attracted celebrities who were down on their luck, healing or in hiding. Just being on this staging area for big fish hunts conferred a measure of cultured machismo. It was like visiting Pamplona before the feria, swimming in Hemingway’s prose without reading a sentence. On Bimini in 1958 one was surrounded by the unassailable purpose and art of angling without needing to pull on a seven-hundred-pounder.

  While Mom painted her abstract pelicans, Mike Wallace walked the King’s Highway with a fierce expression, plotting his next exposé. His style of journalism was brand-new, shocking, no one was quite sure whether it was a new art form or a heightened expression of malice. Sammy Davis, Jr., was holed up at Brown’s Hotel recovering from exhaustion and some form of substance abuse. Sammy sat at the bar, sad smile, played with his cigarette smoke, stared quizzically at the photographs on the wall. All of them were more or less the same: a man dressed in a gaudy Hawaiian shirt, big cigar in his mouth, holding a heavy bent butt rod with a Fin-Nor reel, standing alongside one or two large blue marlin hanging by the tail from a scaffold. A few years before, this man, Axel Witchfeld, had spent the month of August on Bimini and had caught at least one blue marlin for thirty-one consecutive days. To me, this was like hitting seventy homers in a season. Occasionally I still wonder what Sammy thought about all the big dead fish. He sat there day after day with this sad but grateful expression, soaking in atmosphere like a weak man sipping soup.

  That was the first year that Julian Brown, my friend Ozzie’s older brother, began running the hotel for his dad, Harcourt Brown. Julian was back from the Olympics, where he had run the four-forty for the Bahamas, coming in fourth. He had missed a medal by an expanded chest. It seemed like such a terrible loss to me, but handsome, quickwitted Julian was looking ahead to great success in his life. One evening he confided to my dad that Sammy could barely walk, his liver was real bad. Maybe he would die. This was sobering news; in Vegas a few years earlier Sammy had stopped by Abe’s table for a drink. On Bimini, perhaps because of my father’s concern, Sammy’s weakened state seemed earthshaking, like war against Israel.

  By then Dad had already made a lasting mark on the island. One morning, on the spur of the moment, I had invited our handsome young bonefish guide, Ansil Saunders, to have breakfast with us at the Game Club. I had no idea that blacks were not permitted to eat in the dining room, which was festively decorated with larger-than-life portraits of locals cracking conch, cleaning turtles and hanging laundry in the breeze. When the waiter refused to seat us, my father was incensed. How could this short sweaty Negro say no to Abe Waitzkin? My father, who never had the patience or interest to focus on social or political questions, could not accept being crossed. He stormed into the kitchen demanding that we eat our eggs there. But in the kitchen there was no place to sit and the counters were greasy; Dad’s eyes were bulging; what to do? The cook and waiter were flummoxed: Abe was bullying them with the same withering wide-eyed stare that buckled the confidence of union tough guys. We were all led back into the dining room and served.

  After that memorable breakfast we went bonefishing and Ansil demonstrated his wondrous art. We caught six fish that morning, including a nine-pounder that ran like a torpedo. While he poled across the flats and stalked a quarry that was invisible to me, Ansil described his life on the shallow water.

  As a teenager he had fallen in love with the flats. He spent long days in a skiff above this terrain of translucent water over expanses of grass and stretches of white sand, telltale currents, ripples and weed lines, half-beached hammerheads, tailing permit, skittish barracuda, leaping leopard rays and diving seabirds. Ansil followed mysterious trails through forests of mangroves and cold underground currents said to have medicinal value, cool deep pools thick with snapper, the trails opening onto miles of flats, looking through glare on the water for little clouds of mud hiding grubbing bonefish, their clusters of tails breaking the surface like mangrove shoots. As a young man he discovered that he could sense bonefish before he could see them, and then in the distance he could pick them out so far away that other young Bimini men believed he was imagining bonefish. Drifting on his little weather-beaten skiff with his arms folded, he became Lord of the Shallows. His minyan swam here and there with rush and purpose on this grassy potholed plain that was magnified and made hallucinogenic by a lens of slow-moving water.

  Ansil had studied the wind and tide and took meticulous notes on the habits of his quarry. He learned where the schools scattered when the tide began to ebb, where they congregated on the spring tide; when the wind blew out of the north he knew the deep spots to find them along the mangroves. He discovered that there was reason and rhythm to the arrival and mysterious disappearance of the great schools.

  A year or two after our first trip to the island, Ted Williams said that Ansil was the only man he knew who had eyes better than his own; Ansil could see bonefish in water muddied by wind and current; he could find them in the late afternoon when the sun was lying on the water and he was staring into a blinding sheet of glare, could see or sense these gray ghostly fish on cold, sunless days in March when there was a roaring wind out of the northeast and the other guides didn’t leave the dock. Visitors to Bimini began referring to Ansil as the greatest fisherman in the world.

  Following our breakthrough meal, Ansil Saunders began having his breakfast once or twice a month in the Big Game dining room. No one ever tried to stop him. The Red Sea had parted. My father had gained the reputation on Bimini for being a great freedom fighter. Fifteen years later, during Ansil’s tenure as Bimini’s mayor, he would give a speech before Prime Minister Pindling and the Bahamian Parliament in Nassau in which he recalled breaking the color line at the Big Game Fishing Club with the help of a courageous idealist, Abe Waitzkin.

  Of course Sammy Davis didn’t die in 1958. He was back in Vegas a week later, hoofing and crooning with Frankie and Dino. Everyone got well on Bimini. This was my early impression. My father would sometimes arrive on the island barely able to move and after a week trolling in the Stream he was ready to sell, “a new man” was his phrase. On the wall of the Compleat Angler Hotel and Bar there was a motto: The days that a man spends on the sea fishing are not subtracted from his allotted time. I wondered if this might actually be true. Legend, superstition and fact mixed easily in this watery place where men pulled larger-than-life creatures from the depths.

  One fine morning during the first Bimini trip, Dad chartered a sportfishing boat out of the Game Club. The captain was a freckled man, Bill Verity, the lover of Sexy Mama, who danced topless at the Calypso Club. There were two mates, David, a tall, handsome man with a bad speech impediment, and Eric Sawyer, a short, ruddy-skinned Bahamian, Bimini’s foremost blue water skipper, who happened to be between
captain jobs. He had been Hemingway’s captain twenty-five years earlier.

  “Hemingway was very strong, you couldn’t beat him as an angler,” recalled Eric. “And he knew a lot. He taught me the Cuban style of rigging baits. We were never much successful with the drift fishing they did in Cuba, too many sharks over here. But we caught many marlin trolling.”

  For me this was the real Bimini, not the whores and celebrities or even the bonefish flats. I had dreamed of this day, blistering morning sun, diesels throbbing, dragging baits across Hemingway’s blue ocean. As we trolled the swells, I imagined canyons below crowded with huge feeding fish. I was in the chair, in the big leagues only a few years behind immortals like Tommy Gifford, Kip Farrington, George A. Lyon, Axel Witchfeld and Hemingway himself, men who had refined the techniques of big game fishing and landed many world records right here off the north end of Bimini. Not to mention Eric, who had once catered to Hemingway and now adjusted my back harness and treated me like a big deal.

  “Some days I’d tell Hemingway, we’re gonna hook a blue off Picket Rock at four-thirty,” he said. “Come four-thirty, there he was, long and brown, moving like a tiger behind the bait. I have a knack, can’t explain it. It’s a feeling I have about finding fish. I know when and where to look. It is like when you go to sleep and dream the answer to a question. Hemingway would treat my predictions like a joke, he never believed me even though I showed him many times. ‘Eric, it’s just a coincidence,’ he’d say.” Even at forty Eric did not make conventional distinctions between the supernatural and the here and now. As he grew older, and less sensitive to doubting Toms, he more frequently reported miraculous events: deceased friends reappearing on Bimini to give him messages and advice; dreaming at night about lost treasure from a sixteenth-century galleon and then actually finding it in the mangroves of South Bimini. I am tempted to say that great saltwater skippers have an unusual capacity for fantasy and that finding gigantic fish requires a visionary side. But in truth, some of the very best skippers in the world could not be more literal and logical in their approach to finding game fish.