River Man (2016 revision)

"Well, I got two steaks on, and a salad ready to go. Come on over."

"Yeah, well, thanks Hank. Let me wash up. Can I bring anything?"

"Got any more of that Scotch?"

"No. No Scotch. How 'bout some iced tea?"

"Well, if that's all you got..."

I laughed and went below, came up a few minutes later with a pitcher of tea and some ice.

"You got ice?!" he cried when he saw my little ice bucket.

"Hell yes, Hank. There are some things you can live without. Ice ain't one of 'em."

"You put away all that Scotch the other night?"

"It was tea. Sorry."

"No shit? Well, like your steak about medium?"

We sat in his cockpit and put down a pitcher of tea with the steak and salad, talked about the day's fun and games, and I thanked him once again for the helping hand. We talked about his wife -- he wanted to talk about her, as it turned out -- and about the commotion she'd made. Then he asked about, well, me.

"So, you traveling alone?"

"Yes."

"Divorced, huh?"

"No." I could feel myself tightening up, bracing for the inevitable.

"Ah. When did she pass away?"

That question rattled me; not just the question itself, but the prescience behind it.

I looked away.

"So, I got some carrot cake at the grocery in Elizabeth City. Want some?"

I shook myself back into the present, looked around, remembered where I was. Hank was clearing dishes and climbing down below. He came up a few minutes later with a bottle of rum and a couple of shot glasses, then poured a couple of stiff ones with his carrot cake.

"Here. Try this," he said as he tossed back a glass. I looked at him and did the same. It burned, but it felt good, too. He poured another, and another. Pretty soon I couldn't feel my feet. The knees went next. I think.

"So, what's your name?"

"Oh, yeah. We never got around to that, did we? Uh, Ghent, Martin Ghent." I held out my hand. "Pleased to meet you."

"Yeah. Likewise." We shook hands. Again. "So, when did your wife die?"

I guess I was drunk enough by that point to not give a tinker's damn. "Not quite a year ago," I managed to get out, but with that admission the dam broke; I started crying. Hanks response was to pour another drink, which he slid over to me.

"Might as well get it out of your system tonight, Marty. It's like poison in there, and it's killing you."

+++++

When I woke up the next morning my head felt like a latrine. My eyes burned and even my teeth ached. God, rum is vile stuff, which is of course why I drink it -- on occasion to excess. The night before had, I guess, been one such occasion.

I was in my boat, too, and didn't have the slightest idea how I got here. I like those sodden epiphanies. Very good to get the eyes open -- in a hurry.

I put on some coffee, moved forward to take a shower, then went up into the cockpit to eat some fruit and look over the weather charts before the day's run.

"Ah, It lives!" I heard Hank say from the dock beside me.

"What the hell did you give me last night?" I asked as he stood there in the sun. "Battery acid?"

"Nah, nothing so tame. Just some rum, then a little of Mr Cuervo's finest."

"Oh, God no! Not Tequila! How much did I puke?!"

"I don't know, Marty," he said as he pointed at the side of my boat, "but I'll bet the fish around here got pretty well fed."

That wasn't an altogether happy thought. My stomach was still rumbling as I leaned over and looked at the garp all over my otherwise pristine hull.

"So, where you off to this morning," he asked, obviously still impressed with last night's performance.

"New Bern, I think. Want to hole up there before this weather blows through."

"What weather? Oh, you got a weather-fax in there too?"

"Yeah. Tropical depression moving up the coast. Might strengthen."

"Shit. I was thinking of hanging here for a few days, but not if something like that's brewing. New Bern sounds like the best place for that shit. Mind if I tag along."

"Hell no, Hank. I'll buy you a steak tonight!"

"You're on!"

+++++

I beat Hank there by an hour or so, and tied up at the huge marina that belonged to nice looking waterfront hotel, and the marina there was filling up with folks looking for a secure spot to ride out the approaching storm. While I was signing in, I asked the harbormaster if there was room for one more boat.

"How big?" he asked.

"I think it's an Island Packet 29."

"Yeah, right there by the pool. It'll be tight, but it'll be fine for a 29."

"Well, let me sign him in. There a good place for a steak around here?

"Well, the hotel is good, and you don't have to walk far!' he said with a sly grin. "They'll even bring it down to the boat - you know, room service is included here."

As I was walking back to the boat I saw Hank's boat coming under the big highway bridge, and jumped down into the cockpit and flipped on the radio.

"Hanky-Panky, this is Liebestod , go to 23."

"Marty? That you? This place looks full?!"

"Come on in. I got a slip for you; just turn in the breakwater and come down this first pier to the right - right past my boat. I'll wait for you by the spot, have your lines ready for a starboard docking."

"Ten-four, Marty! Thanks!"

+++++

"Hey Marty, hope you don't mind, but I called that woman in Elizabeth City. She came by last night, wanted to meet you."

Marty had docked his boat and thanked me again, and grabbed his shower stuff and ambled off to the marina's shower facilities without so much as a peep. Now I knew what he was up too, and I was angry -- all over again.

"Listen, Hank, I don't mean to be rude, but I'm not ready for that kinda thing just yet, and I don't need anyone pulling this kind of crap on me, okay?"

"Yeah, Marty, whatever you say, but she's bringing a friend, too, if you know what I mean, so don't fuck this up for me, OK? Been a long time since I got laid, alright?"

I shook my head, let slip a little laugh as I walked back to my boat while I wondered just what the hell he'd gotten us into.

+++++

There was a knock on the side of my hull.

"Martin! You there?"

I trudged back up the companionway. The sky was full of dark, menacing clouds.

"You got that weather fax running? Guy up on the dock said the storm has been upgraded to a hurricane."

I looked around. No women.

"No, I've had it off all afternoon. Come on down; I'll fire it up and print one off."

"No, that's alright," he said, turning as he heard someone calling his name. I looked down the dock and saw two women walking our way. "That's them," I heard him say. "Come on, Marty," he whispered conspiratorially."Please, don't fuck this up for me!"

I climbed up into the cockpit in time to hear raindrops falling on my cockpit awning, and looked up to see the women running the final few yards toward the boat. Shit! One of 'em was wearing high heels! Not on my teak decks! No!

That's what I remember thinking! Their shoes, killing my decks!

"Shoes off!" Hank yelled as the women pulled up short. "Shoes off and hop on!"

+++++

We were sitting down below. I had the weather fax on and the VHF set to NOAA channel one. The hurricane, now a Category Two monster -- and building -- was predicted to make landfall somewhere between Myrtle Beach and Cape Hatteras tomorrow, about noon. We were right in the middle of the bullseye, so to speak, but in a well protected spot if ever there was one. Not much to do, anyway, but warp out extra lines in the morning and lay out all our fenders.

"Isn't this exciting!" Susan Cooke said. Susan was Hank's date. "Mine" was one Betty Hutton, and she hadn't said much since coming aboard, but she was looking around at everything like she was taking inventory. Very weird, very disconcerting. Color me very paranoid.

"Yeah? I've never heard hurricanes being described as exciting!" Hank said. "I would think coming from this area you might have been through one or two."

"I'm new here," Susan said.

"I'm hungry!" Hank said.

"And I don't want to go out in the rain!" Susan said.

"Oh hell, Susan, it's not going to hurt you!" This from the formerly high-heeled Miss Hutton.

"Well, there's always Room Service!" I said, and everyone thought that uproariously funny. "Uh, no, I'm serious. We're guests at the hotel, and they have room service. The guy at the harbormaster's office gave me a menu, and we're hooked up to the hotel's phone system"

Everyone looked at me like I'd just grown another head. It was beginning to look like this was going to be an evening for wine, so I went and fetched a bottle from the fridge and popped the cork.

"Ooh, I love Champagne!" Susan bubbled, but Betty looked at her with motherly concern.

"It's not the best in the world, but it'll do," I said as I poured four glasses. I went back into the salon and passed around the glasses. I watched as the women took a sip.

"Nice, very nice," Betty said appreciatively.

"Ooh, I love it," Susan said as she tossed it down. "Could I have some more?!" Betty winced as I took Susan's glass and walked back to the galley. I didn't hear Betty get up and follow me.

"What is that, Martin? Dom Perignon?"

She looked at the bottle and gasped as I poured Susan another glass, this time filling it to the rim.

"Don't do this. Don't do this, Martin." I saw Betty's mouth moving, but I heard Ruth's voice.

"I bought it for an anniversary. Won't be needing it now, so just let me get rid of the stuff, okay?"

Betty turned -- clearly exasperated -- and walked back to Susan, but I saw Betty whispering in Susan's ear as I returned with the full glass. Susan's eyes went wide, and she frowned as I put the glass down. I put some music from the fifties on the CD player and sat back to watch the festivities. The Moonglow Theme, from the movie Picnic -- one of our all time favorites -- filled the boat with overwhelming memories, and I sat back and looked at the ceiling as my eyes filled with tears.

I heard people leaving the boat; footsteps on wet teak -- then the companionway hatch sliding open again, followed by a blast of warm, storm-driven air -- and they were, I assumed when I heard the hatch slide shut, gone.

"Sorry Hank," I said through the tears grabbing me by the throat. "Sorry to let you down like that."

"Oh, somehow I think Hank and Susan can take care of themselves."

I jumped at the sound of her voice. 'Ruth? Ruth? Is that you?'

I looked around the boat; the lights were now turned down very low, music continued to play softly -- Dianne Reeves singing I've Got My Eyes On You -- and I saw Betty sitting there in the gloom, right where she had been all evening. She was looking at me. Looking just like that physician in D.C. when she told me Ruth was gone.

+++++

"Tell me about her."

I heard her voice, but she wasn't real, this couldn't be real. This couldn't be happening...

"Martin, listen to me." It was Betty again, or was it Ruth? "Hank told me a little about, about your wife, on the telephone. You can't hang on to this stuff. At some point you've got to let go."

I looked at the woman -- this stranger, really -- telling me what I needed to do, about how I should handle my grief, and all I wanted to do was show her the way out, to be rid of her, to be alone once again with my memories of Ruth. Oh, Ruth! Why?

"Listen, uh, Betty is it? I don't really feel up to this tonight, you know, so, if you'll please just excuse me."

"Martin, sit down."

I could see this wasn't going to be easy. I remember thinking I probably looked like her Sugar-Daddy savior, come riding through town on his yacht-yuppie sailboat with big bucks in his back pocket and just ready to carry her away to the bright lights of her favorite big city.

You know, after jumping to conclusions so many times those past few days, you'd have thought I was getting kind of tired by then.

No way. I had a couple more lessons to learn.

But little did I know -- I had just run into my new teacher.

+++++

Once upon a time, when I was an impressionable young man still in college, I had been an unconscionably optimistic person. I believed in people, in the joy people were capable of feeling in the company of others, and in the joy I was capable of passing along to others. And I had, again - once upon a time - taken a philosophy class. Now that in and of itself is no crime, though of course I know a strong argument can be made to the contrary, but in any case, my motives for taking the class were pure in the extreme. The prof was a total babe.

Fresh out of graduate school, she was an untenured radically hip-chic that half the guys on campus had the hots for. Her classes were packed with jocks and all the other Big Men On Campus who were out to drown her classroom in testosterone and Aqua-Velva; pretty soon it was apparent that while Hip-chic (kind of) enjoyed the attention she was getting in class, she wasn't interested in guys that came to class wearing big gold chains around their necks and drove around campus at fifty miles per in their orange Corvettes - still in first gear, mind you. Just too many people moving around in circles, I suppose, and she was a straight down the middle of the road type.

Her name was Ruth Jorgensen, and seven years after I took that class we got married.

She used to talk a lot about the geometry of the heart, about the diametric opposites that define how humans experience the, well, the human. These opposites insured, she maintained, that human affairs tended to the cyclical, that humans moved from one experience to it's polar opposite in endless cycles. Intellectual progress was almost impossible; as a species we were and always would be locked in a tooth and nail struggle for dominion over other humans because, she said, people couldn't learn from their mistakes. We were narcissists through and through. Egoists to the bitter end. In a Freudian sense, we were so blindly consumed with the playing out of our own death wish we couldn't make out the broad contours of the effects our live's cycles had on others. People everywhere, and in endless profusions of intersecting cycles, experienced life as a series of never ending collisions. Collisions between intermeshing cycles of Being and Becoming. The endless enigma, she liked to say, of conflict running through our lives like a river.

A river full of stumps, no doubt.

Now I know when people start quoting Freud it's time to run screaming from the room, but there was something about this professor's hopelessness that touched me. I went to her office in the faculty building one day after class was over, presumably to ask her a question about a point she'd made in that day's lecture, and as it happened no one was waiting in line at her office door (and I think it reasonable to add here that by mid-semester the jocks had given up all hope of nailing her, and so had dropped the class).

She looked up when I knocked on her door, and seemed surprised to see me.

I think I asked her about rule utilitarianism -- or some such deontological bullshit -- and that really threw her for a loop, because I think by that point the poor girl had been propositioned by every pretender on campus. I watched her eyes blink a few times as it registered that I was (shock! gasp!) actually asking her a question about -- holy shit -- something we'd (actually) covered in class. I'm not saying the girl fainted dead away, but you could have heard a mouse fart in that office for the next thirty or so seconds.

Anyway, we talked for an hour or three and, to make a long story even longer, after a while she chided me about being overly optimistic about human nature. I asked her if it was possible that she was being -- again, possibly -- overly cynical. Again, a flatulent mouse floating air muffins would have made either of us jump in the silence that followed.

She pointed to a framed poster behind me on her office wall, and asked me to turn and read it.

The poster was a photograph of Friedrich Nietzsche, with one of his more delicate aphorisms nicely printed along the bottom, under, of course, his nicely scowling face, and these words summed up her point of view quite nicely: 'In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence, and loathing seizes him.'

When you really get your head around a saying like that, you can kinda see why the Nazis had such a thing for Nietzsche. And see, the thing is, I married this girl.

Anyway, I wasn't buying it that day, and after thirty years of marriage I still didn't buy into it.

Only after Ruth sighed 'Oh!' and dropped dead to the asphalt like a sack of rocks did I buy into it; only then did Nietzsche become my patron saint of gloom and doom.

And, of course, by that point mouses everywhere were learning to roar again.

+++++

As we sat in the darkness below, the storm drew strength from the chaos of life on earth and an ill wind began to moan in the rigging. It's almost a cliché, I know, but unless you've heard wind in the rigging before you really have no idea how deeply rooted that sound is in our -- all too human -- consciousness. And like the wind, as I sat down below telling my story to Betty Hutton, I drew strength from the chaos of my life, and the song of my sorrow bathed the womb of that night -- in tremulous decrescendos?

Ruth continued to work in academia for twenty five more years, and we met again, quite by accident, when I came home from Vietnam a few years later and just after I started flying for Braniff. We lived in Chicago most of our lives; even after Braniff went bankrupt I got on with a small airline, and eventually, with TWA. We had a boy, he loved to fly and followed my footsteps into the Navy.

And he managed to get himself killed flying a peace-keeping mission in Somalia.

It's those little ironies that give Nietzsche his punch. Take my word for it, would you?

We worked hard after that, worked hard playing our roles, and playing by the rules. Me, the perpetual optimist, and Ruth, the cynic, who had turned her back on the basic assumptions of her life when she said 'Yes, I'll marry you.' As we grew into the reality that life did in fact go on after a child's death, as we accepted the basic preconditions of living in a completely absurd state, we decided to go after the one shared dream we'd both harbored for years.

We'd buy a sailboat and explore this world. It was audacious and we knew it, but it was our one shining beacon, lighting the way, and that dream kept us going. One day, the dream became our shared reality, and we held it close as we watched land fall away astern.

Then my wife, the one love of my life, let go of my hand as she said 'Oh' -- and that was it. That was me, I told the woman staring at me, me -- in a turtle's shell, after the dream fell away and left nothingness as my sole companion.

When I finished my tale I looked over to see Betty Hutton in tears. Quiet tears, quiet sighs of understanding. She knew where I was, I think I saw, perhaps what I was confronting. Why, I wondered?

She told me she had never been married, had never experienced having a child. She had worked in D.C.; worked for her uncle. He happened to be in Congress -- had been for as long as anyone could remember, too. She'd gone from Georgetown Law straight onto her uncle's staff; she had co-managed her uncle's one very unsuccessful run at the White House, and had remained on-board long after all the political hacks and wannabes had moved on to greener pastures. Her uncle had passed away a few years ago, and the old man had, she said, left her with more than a little money. She took some of it and opened up an antique shop in Elizabeth City, and when that didn't work out she opened up the wine and cheese shop I'd seen her in. She had wanted, she said, to live a quiet life near the town where she had grown up, and yet never wanted to see Washington, D.C., ever again.