The Last Marlin Read online

  Needless to say, I shared my father’s view that Pop’s criticism of our spending habits was small-minded. True, Dad was often short of cash, but who lived like him, like us? I adored my father for all the great restaurants and fancy trips, for never settling for less than ringside or box seats behind home plate. And no mistake about it, we were getting ahead, closing in on the forty-footer. Together we searched through boating magazines and debated the pros and cons of Huckinses, Wheelers and Rybovichs—the gold platters of the sportfishing world. Each of Dad’s trips edged us closer.

  I was incomplete when he was away. I treaded water until he was back and we could count his successes over our breakfast cereal and make our plans. On one trip Dad took a couple of union guys down to Puerto Rico for several days of marlin fishing. For some reason he wouldn’t take me along, and I was beside myself when he left. He rarely fished without me and such was our camaraderie on the ocean that it was hard for me to believe he would leave me behind. I paced the halls of Great Neck High wondering about their trolling. For three days I could think of nothing else but Dad’s lines slipping through the ocean.

  He arrived home at two A.M., after I had fallen asleep. In the morning I could hear him snoring in his bed. I was bitter for not having stayed up for him as I had intended, for having squandered an opportunity to talk about his adventure off San Juan. I could barely contain myself while Dad spent twenty minutes in the bathroom. I knew this time was painful for him as I sometimes heard him moan on the toilet.

  Finally we were in the kitchen together. Winnie the maid poured Cream of Wheat into our bowls. “How’d you do?” I tried to ask with a measure of detachment. Dad was beaming. “I caught a marlin.” A blue marlin! How had he ever managed it? I didn’t think my father had the physical strength to pull on such a fish. I quickly concluded that it must have been a small one, but I didn’t make him tell me this. According to Dad’s narration, the fight was easy except for the sharks. Soon after he had hooked the marlin three or four big bull sharks circled the boat, attracted by the struggling fish’s blood. But the captain knew what to do. He took twenty feet of wire leader and twisted large hooks on both ends. Then he put a mullet on each hook and tossed the rig over. In seconds the baits were grabbed by two large sharks. Dad and the union guys could see the roiling on the surface as the sharks twisted and smashed their tails trying to get free of one another. After throwing over several of these rigs there were no more sharks, and Dad was able to wind in the marlin.

  When I was a teenager I knew little about union officials and politicians besides their taste for lavish restaurants and fishing trips. In Miami we dined at the Fontainebleau with a couple of union guys Dad referred to as “lieutenants,” real tough guys. But over our steaks the conversation was light, families and vacations. Life was a party. Dad said they were terrific fellas who would do anything for him. My father grinned when he had the bill in his hand and these burly men were left reaching and shaking their heads. Joe Waitzkin never understood that such moments were money in the bank.

  “Abe always knew the right person to get on the phone. That was the key,” reflects his old friend from the Globe days. “If he didn’t know who to call, he found out. With his charisma he was able to befriend public officials as well as labor leaders and contractors. He formed friendships with local union guys as well. Because of his close relationship with all parties he managed to get the inside track on deals all over the country.”

  One time we were eating blintzes at the St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South, and Dad introduced me to Carmine De Sapio, who was seated nearby. I knew that he was the boss of Tammany Hall but I didn’t know what that meant. I recall Dad saying to me that you couldn’t get a sanitation job in New York City without De Sapio’s approval. A couple of times I had seen him on television taking the Fifth Amendment before a committee. In the dimly lit restaurant Carmine was wearing sunglasses, as was his habit. His smile was sad, world-weary, and he seemed happy to run into my dad. Another night I joined Dad for dinner at Cavanagh’s steak house on 23rd Street with a New York City commissioner who was one of De Sapio’s friends. I recall this perfumed man eating large shrimp and whispering intriguing delectables to my old man. Dad had told me the Commissioner was a man of vast and unusual power. He said that if I ever had a big problem in my life, this man could take care of it for me. Having access to unlimited power through the Commissioner made me feel like one of the chosen, but I wondered what such a problem might be and if I would be allowed to ask for help more than once.

  Dad said that the key to getting jobs was delicate maneuvering between the unions and the electrical contractors. The locals were often at one another’s throats. Being friendly with one official might mean trouble with another. If the unions wouldn’t go along with it, no deal with any electrical contractor was worth the piece of paper it was written on. If you didn’t have the unions, the men wouldn’t wire fixtures into the ceiling, they wouldn’t even take them off the trucks. But then, of course, the unions didn’t mean much if you didn’t have the contractors. I wasn’t sure exactly where the politicians fit into the picture. Dad was vague about his methods and connections, even with me. He would frequently caution, never let the left hand know what the right hand is doing.

  Without a doubt, making big deals in the fifties took considerable finesse and stroking. I worried about this relative to my own career as a salesman. When meeting potential customers, Dad had style and confidence, and in his field getting through the door was half the battle. When I met people for the first time, I tended to paw the ground and ponder my escape. When I didn’t like someone, which was often the case, I found it difficult to be hearty and convincing. Instead, I grew sullen, which is not good for selling. I worried if I would be able to change.

  Fischbach and Moore, Dad said, was the biggest electrical contractor in the country, a bigger operation even than Globe, which taxed my imagination. Before he became friends with Harry and Alan Fischbach, Dad recognized that teaming Globe with Fischbach to light skyscrapers would mean a gold mine for him. But it wasn’t that simple. Reps from all over the country were always trying to land Fischbach.

  At different times Harry, CEO of the company, and his son Alan visited our house in Great Neck for late breakfast. Both men were tall and suntanned from vacations in Palm Springs. I recall Harry making a few remarks to Mom about recent trail rides in the desert. But for the most part, during their visits, we talked about our Great Neck lives and the Fischbachs said little, giving the impression that they were thinking about more important issues. Even without this kingly reserve, their wealth and impressive height gave father and son an aura of aloofness and vague discomfort, as though our rooms were too low and narrow for proper stretching. As we schmeared cream cheese on bagels, the conversation at these breakfasts faltered and Dad’s smile was forced. I recall standing and waving with my father on the front lawn as Alan drove off. Dad mused that he was a brilliant man.

  Two or three times we tied up our little boat alongside their yacht, the Friendly Fisch, which sometimes moored off Sands Point in the Long Island Sound. Dad predicted that these rendezvous would be great, but once we were on board the talk drifted to renovations for Alan’s house in Westchester, trips to Egypt and Africa. Dad’s enthusiasm for these topics made me feel uncomfortable. It seemed ridiculous that no one on board the Friendly Fisch was interested in fishing. But Dad became annoyed when once or twice I indicated distaste for these rendezvous. “Get with it,” he said, as though I lived on another planet.

  “Harry Fischbach visited the Great Neck house because I was there,” recalls my mother. “When he came at nine in the morning in his big limousine, it wasn’t to talk business with Abe. He had been interested in me for years, before I married Abe, but my father put him off. Abe knew that I had this power over Harry, who was seventy years old at the time. Abe encouraged it.

  “Harry was rude from the beginning, stuck up his nose at our house. He called it a ‘little develop
ment’ as though it were a six-room Levittown model. He lived in a fancy mansion somewhere, Westchester, I think. I found his remarks annoying, and, though it sounds ridiculous, I insisted that our house was spacious and attractive. Before breakfast I showed him around.

  “We were upstairs in your bedroom when Harry pushed me through the door into the attic. He pulled me close to him and kissed me. I was shocked. He was seventy years old. I wasn’t used to such passion. Abe wasn’t a passionate man. Harry was breathing like a storm.

  “By then Harry’s son Alan was running the company. He would sometimes join Abe and me at nightclubs like the Copacabana, which was one of your father’s favorites. Alan would put his hand on my leg under the table and I would brush it off. I knew that Abe encouraged this just like with the father. Once we were in a club and I said to Abe in a loud voice, ‘Abe, do you know what Alan is doing?’ They exchanged this expression, ‘What’s wrong with Stella?’ Like I should have been going along with the program.”

  It is hard to believe that my mother simply imagined these moments, and yet I am suspicious about her claim that my father was the architect. When she speaks of Abe she refers only to his darker maneuvering. She has no memory of my father’s warmth and caring, no interest in what the men did when they were off on their own, their courting before the deal, the sense of promise that marked their finest moments. My aunt Celia insists that Alan Fischbach loved my father, as many men did, and reflects that my mother relished drama beyond reality and that she needed to be the center of attention even in theaters she considered dismal. Since Alan Fischbach is no longer with us, the question of which Waitzkin was the object of the contractor’s true affection hangs unresolved. But there is no doubt that my mother abhorred my father’s networking. She cringed as he curried the favor of men whom she found banal and vulgar.

  For my mother the Great Neck years were a deepening fog. By the time I entered high school there were periods when she could not get out of bed except to drag herself into her studio, where she painted into the night. Her work of this period reflects depression and paranoia and impending disaster. In twisted carnival character faces her subjects suggest betrayal and despair. Stella herself is portrayed as a tragic clown, an observer. Abe is a liar, cheat and chiseler. Her sister-in-law Laurie, Alfred’s wife, whom she did not trust, is the black widow, smiling behind dark veils.

  When I stared at her canvases as a boy, I could see nothing but unrecognizable forms, most of them dark. Her art was careening away from everything that was identifiable and warm. In her self-portraits the faces were obliterated by swirls and gashes of chaos. In one that she called Abe the faintest form of a man appeared to be atomizing, he had almost disappeared. Mother insisted that her work was lifelike, which taxed my view of reality and triggered fights between us. She attacked her canvases with long, vicious strokes. Everything about my mother’s work was disturbing and I continued to believe that she painted this way mainly to irritate me and Dad.

  There were nights when Mother roused herself from malaise. I watched her seated before her Globe vanity mirror with a dozen radiant bulbs, artfully applying her makeup, then posing this way and that wearing a scarf like a Gypsy to go with a long skirt. This was odd because Mother usually did not care about her appearance. Then she would leave my brother and me with Winnie and drive her sputtering Morris Minor off into the night. Mother’s trips to Greenwich Village felt different to me than Dad’s sojourns in Cleveland and Detroit. He was doing the family business. Mother was driving to a foreign place that had nothing to do with us.

  Many would say that the early and middle fifties comprised the most important period in American art history and surely it was the most electric. Abstract expressionism had taken hold of the New York art scene, blowing aside representational work and the hallowed painting principles of centuries. Painters around New York did their work quickened by a torrent of new possibilities and the belief that breakthroughs of historic proportions were taking place every day in junky lofts around town. Everyone was playing by new rules and anyone with a brush felt as though he were making a lasting contribution. At the Cedar Tavern on East 11th Street, where the best painters in the city spent drinking nights, realistic artists were considered pariahs. When Andy Warhol came by, artist George Spaventa labeled him “Andy Whorehole.”

  At the Cedar Tavern, painters, sundry intellectuals, celebrities and hangers-on would crowd close to listen and gawk, as though the smoky bar itself conferred something close to art. When Pollock or Kline showed up, someone would make a phone call. More painters and would-bes crowded in to drink, argue, try to bed women, learn something. More painters stood on the street waiting to get inside. “They’re all ducks,” Bill de Kooning would mutter ironically.

  Into this new world came Stella, wide-eyed and beautiful, dressed in her Gypsy outfits or sometimes a designer dress from Loehmann’s. These thrilling nights were an escape from suburbia, a big chance. She dove into the Cedar Tavern with flair and confidence; she used Abe as her model, how he would have taken over the room.

  Mother became friends with Spaventa and painters Gandy Brodie and Jan Müller. She was introduced to Franz Kline, who often painted for only an hour and then put in a long drinking day at the bar. Kline was the spitting image of the actor Ronald Colman. Mother found him intense, smoldering. “If you like someone you should tell them,” Kline whispered to Stella, who was clearly drawn to him. She listened, rapt, while Jan Müller criticized Wolf Kahn for painting pretty pictures, and to Kline and Pollock arguing hotly about the work of Philip Guston. One night Jackson Pollock was blind drunk and yelled at Milton Resnick, “You are an imitator of an imitator.” To Mother, who already knew Pollock from East Hampton, the painter’s massive physical stature lent weight to his pronouncements and mirrored the epic scope of his work. Pollock got plowed and explained that the subject of his paintings was the sky.

  Buying great art was much simpler than landing lighting contracts from Fischbach and Moore. At the Cedar Tavern, Kline, Pollock, de Kooning and others bartered drawings for a few bucks to buy drinks. Mother bought a few, feeling guilty and liberated. Money wasn’t a big deal. Kline only wanted enough in his pocket to buy a good steak. It was about the work, not the money. It never occurred to anyone that these bartered paintings would be worth millions in a few years, that drunken signatures scrawled on drawings at the bar would be pored over for authenticity by somber museum curators with fortunes hanging in the balance.

  For her entire life Mother had played against the rules of I.R. and Abe without her own defining context. In the family and business world she was known for being rebellious or childish or eccentric. But among the painters at the Cedar Tavern she felt part of a family. The themes in my mother’s art were serious, embodying her alienation and the unhappiness of a loveless marriage, but still I think that the central alchemy of this new kind of painting was deeply resonant with my mother’s prankster soul. The goal was to wrench intense feeling and meaning from lines and unrecognizable shapes, or, as the critic Clement Greenberg wrote, from “abstractness and absence of assignable definition.” Such oxymorons have always been at the core of my mother’s humor, as well as her art. It tickled Stella to make paintings that the neighbors could never understand, that left her father speechless. Other artists might visit Jackson Pollock in East Hampton with heavy aesthetic questions; Mother showed up with a box of bloody bluefish.

  In a reach of impishness extreme even for her, she talked my father into coming with her to a party at the loft of the painter Wolf Kahn. Abe walked in wearing a long gray coat and one of his gangster hats. Immediately my father knew that something was very wrong. There were Negroes milling around. There was a mattress on the floor. Who would sleep on the floor? he asked Mother suspiciously. There were cockroaches climbing the walls. After a few minutes Wolf Kahn came to my mother and asked, Who is this detective? This was one of the few times she brought Abe into her world.

  The Ebb Tide

  D
URING MY EARLY TEENAGE YEARS THERE WERE MANY NIGHTS when I sat on top of the stairs and listened to my father moaning in his first-floor bedroom. He was rolled up in a ball with cramps. As the minutes passed, Dad’s pain would seem to become more severe and I worried that he would die. Sometimes Bill joined me, but I always felt, during these tense occasions, that it was the drama of the moment more than concern that brought my brother to the top stair. After my worry became intolerable there would be a ring at the front door. Mother opened it and Dr. Nelson walked briskly inside and headed toward my father’s bedroom. Fifteen minutes later they walked back to the door, and the doctor spoke to her soothingly. A few times after the doctor’s departure I crept to the open door of Dad’s bedroom. Now my father was sleeping like a kitten. It was astonishing that the doctor had such power to cure.

  Disease became the wolf at my door. Only sickness could smash our fishing plans, kill our happiness. Not just Dad’s illnesses and operations. At times I could feel disease burrowing into my body, growing tendrils. Shortly before puberty I began the arduous life’s work of monitoring my health. A friend of mine was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes and had to go for shots. For months my concern was diabetes. I noticed that I was drinking a lot of water and my fingers and toes tingled from lack of circulation. Then my focus switched to my appendix. Each night I burrowed my hand deep into the right side of my large intestine until it ached. I would break out into a sweat. I had it, all right. Once or twice I asked Dad to arrange a visit to the Clinic for me as he often had for his buddies in the lighting industry. I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t take me. When I could no longer stand the tension, I would walk into my mother’s studio and urge her to drive me to see Dr. Nelson. Usually she talked me out of it. Eat an apple, she advised. Sometimes I insisted. Even when I was twelve and thirteen my visits to the doctor were close to hysterical. With each examination of my abdomen or testicles or neck glands, I expected the worst, whatever that was. As a young teenager I made a distinction between dying of disease and dying in all other ways. Dying of illness was grotesque, shameful, worse than going to hell. Drowning in the Gulf Stream, for example, or being torn apart by large sharks seemed like a tolerable ending.