Corcovado V

Posted on November 25, 2017 by adrianleverkuhnwrites

Corcovado 5

Corcovado + Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars

Chapter V

He heard voices again, voices far away – as if on the far side of a dream. Scratchy voices lost in time, voices full of concern – and then he knew where he was.

Again.

The low tree-line in the distance, that same low, rocky escarpment – and the village beyond. Spreading fires lighting up the marsh as he falls from the sky, Tiger 509 tumbling through the swamp like a paper cup tossed from a passing car, gouts of fire erupting on the surface of the black swamp below his leg. The pain excruciating now, like something inside him is on fire. He knows if he looks down, looks at the onrushing earth inside the mottled red shadows under his boots he’ll see jagged shards of metal jutting from his leg…and there will be blood.

Then, he feels something on his forehead, something like a washcloth, cool and damp, and the muffled sounds of people talking again – far away – like voices in another room – and he wonders how this could possibly be – because he feels like he’s being pushed away from this life and, suddenly, those voices didn’t matter anymore.

“When did this happen? The first time, I mean?” the physician asked.

“It was in the early nineties, I think, after he came back from Iraq,” Ted said, looking back at the discarded memories of his childhood – like looking through the pages of a book that contained nothing but painful images. “His leg was pretty messed up, some kind of bacteria got into the wound, like in the space between the skin and the muscle, and it spread. My mom told me he nearly lost his right leg after they got him to Germany. But whatever it is, it’s come back several times since…two or three times that I can remember.”

“When was the last time?”

“Oh, I guess…maybe…three years ago. He went to the VA hospital in Seattle that time, I think, for some kind of special injections.”

“And it keeps coming back?” Melissa asked, clearly now concerned.

“It’s probably triggering some sort of autoimmune disorder at this point,” the physician said, shrugging as she looked around the boat. “You said he lives aboard? How long?”

“Not that long. Maybe nine months…not quite a year, anyway.”

“Humid down here, but I don’t see any signs of mold or mildew,” she sighed, as if talking to herself. “Well, whatever, with a temperature of 103 we’re going to have to get him back to a big hospital. I’ll call it in, have an air ambulance land outside the entrance. They can taxi right up to the boat, load him up right here. I think he should be taken straight to Vancouver, by the way. Be less paperwork than going to the US that way.”

“What about the boat?” Ted asked.

“Well, you’ll need to stay with him on the trip down; is there anyone who can remain aboard and keep an eye on things?”

“I can,” Melissa said, her voice now steady and calm – then, as she looked at Tracy there was an implied command in her voice.

“I guess I can, too,” Tracy added – though her voice was brimming with reluctance.

Ted turned, looked at Melissa, yet he could now see Tracy had been shaken by this unexpected turn of events – but that Melissa seemed steady as a rock. “I’ll go,” he said, “and get him checked-in, then I’ll turn around as fast as I can and come right back. Unless he’s released by then. I think we should try to take the boat back to Seattle…”

“The, what…the three of us?” Melissa asked, her voice full of alarm. “Do you think that’s…that he’d want you to do that?”

“What are the options?” Ted asked.

The physician chimed-in then: “There’s the town-dock, over in Whaletown. I know the Harbor Master, I could talk him into keeping an eye on her for a few weeks.”

Ted looked at the doctor, then at Melissa. “I don’t think so. This is my father’s home – and I’m not about to leave it sitting out here, unattended…”

“Well, think it over,” the doctor said, her voice a distant sigh. “If you could run me ashore now, I’ll call for an air ambulance, then we can send a nurse out to help you load him on the airplane. She’ll fly in with you to the hospital.”

Ted nodded and looked at his unconscious father again, then went topsides and helped the physician into the Zodiac. They motored off across the little cove to the store by the inlet, and he was back in a half hour – but Melissa was waiting for him on the swim platform, her arms crossed protectively across her breast, and he thought she was glowering at the world.

“Not quite what you signed up for, is it?” Ted said to her stony, fiercely expressionless eyes.

“Oh, it’s not that. I feel afraid, and yet I don’t really know why…”

“Afraid? Why…of what?”

“I don’t know, Ted. It’s hard to put my finger on it, ya know? But I feel a connection. It was, I don’t know why – or even how to say this – ” she said, suddenly almost gulping for air. “But I’ve felt a connection with your father since I saw him this morning…yet…”

“Yet? Just what are you trying to say?”

“I’ve felt drawn to this place for days…felt as if something, or someone, was pushing me to go to that bakery this morning, and when I saw your boat pull up to the dock, saw your father walking around down there I just knew I’d been summoned here, for a reason.”

“Summoned?” he said – warily.

“Yes. Like God wanted me to be here for some reason. Does that make any sense at all to you?”

He nodded his head as his stomach turned, then looked at the companionway hatch. “The plane should be here within an hour.”

“You should go pack some things, for both of you – just in case.”

He nodded, then turned and went below…but he stopped first – and stared at the sky for a moment, lost in the feeling that something was terribly wrong.

The girls, all of them save one, were slaves. It was as simple as that.

And Elizabeth, being a rather quiet, even a staid product of far-upstate Vermont, found herself ill-prepared for what came next, to handle the information that came out of these forgotten girls. She found that one or two offered to translate, though one girl, in particular, seemed to be quite fluent. This girl was well-dressed, haughty and indifferent, and Elizabeth figured this girl was on the inside of the operation, part of the inner family, and soon she had this girl sequestered from the others. Then, once she talked with one of the girls willing to interpret, she began her interviews with the girls – one by one…

They were bound for New York City, they said, and most of them already had “owners” lined up, though a few of the younger ones, she soon learned, were more like speculative ventures. Young virgins, for the most part, these girls would show up “to work at restaurants on the East Side” one day, but they would be snatched up within hours by their owners, destined to work as “housekeepers” – though, she learned, these as yet unattached waifs rarely did anything but housework. No, these girls were part of a steady stream of children being imported into the US, allegedly to work as domestics, but the truth of their existence, Elizabeth soon understood, was as part of a far darker world. All would work in the sex trade, either as domestic sex slaves or as “actresses” in brutally sadistic S&M films. One of the girls she talked with had a friend who had reportedly been killed – for the film, such as it was, was all about killing very young virgins. Or so this girl said.

Ted heard an aircraft overhead and went topsides to look for it; he saw the ungainly looking beast through the trees that lined the cove, and he watched as it flared and settled on the water. Then, with a wary eye, he looked on as it taxied through the inlet and he found himself wondering, for perhaps the first time in his life, what it was like to fly. To be a pilot. To do the things his father had done.

‘That’s odd,’ he thought as he watched the beast approach. ‘I’ve been surrounded by pilots and aircraft my whole life, yet never once have I…’

“Is that the plane?” he heard Tracy ask, and so, biting his tongue, he turned to her and nodded his head. “What took them so long?” she asked, and again, he fought back the urge to lash out at her inanity and simply shrugged.

He watched the aircraft pass a few anchored boats, their owners now very curious indeed and staring at the floats as it passed. As the beast drew near he saw the doctor was onboard and, oddly enough, she waved at him, and smiled. He waved away his fear and tried to meet her smile, then he thought about Melissa – and about the things she’d told him down below.

Drawn to his father. By God. Never had an interest in Canada, nor even heard of Desolation Sound, but for weeks she had felt a need to be here – today. Her description of seeing his father on the fuel dock had rattled him, too. He looked god-like, she said, wreathed in an aura of golden flame, and she said she knew right then that her destiny waited now, waited for a decision. She had been waiting for him all her life.

He’d tried to measure her words against his own experience of God – and he’d come up short. God didn’t do things like this, did He?

Or did He?

Or…was her being here really nothing more or less than chance, a mere coincidence. A simple statistical anomaly, a chain of unrelated events leading to a new outcome, like intricate lines of dominoes set to fall along predictable paths, only – interrupted by an earthquake. Destin. Sailboats. Her ex-husband, a pilot with Delta who had known his father. How many coincidences must there be, he sighed as these varied images came to mind, before things just didn’t add up any longer?

The pilot maneuvered his aircraft through the water in a tight arc, swinging the loading doors right up to Altair’s lifelines, and he grabbed hold and held the plane’s elevators off the shrouds while the pilot hopped out onto a float and secured the aircraft’s floats to Altair. After his father was lifted aboard the aircraft he grabbed their duffels and hopped aboard, but then, before he went further he turned and looked at Melissa.

Her eyes were full of tears, yet he felt strength in them, too.

‘So many contradictory impulses,’ he said, if only to himself, then he smiled at her – as the pilot let slip the lines and pushed his airplane away from Altair’s navy blue hull.

“You’ll need to sit up front with me,” the pilot said. “No room aft, I’m afraid.”

“Right.” He looked at Melissa after he clambered up into the tiny cockpit, looked at her – standing on his father’s home – as the airplane taxied out the inlet into open water. He looked down at Altair after they took off and circled the cove, lost inside all the implications of her last words to him.

“He’s in God’s hands now, Ted. Have faith in Him.”

Then, quite suddenly, he knew just what it was she’d experienced – and where his future lay.

She’d never imagined worlds like this existed. That one’s life could be so utterly, so wantonly castrated of meaning, of purpose, of even the simplest joy. It was as if these women, these girls really, had been wiped clean from the book of life. Erased, in silence, and no one would bear witness to their suffering save the warped souls who would torment them on their way through this life. These girls, all of them unwanted in their homeland and lucky even to be alive, had been cast adrift soon after birth, only to be raised almost as domestic animals, kept alive for their potential worth once they reached a certain age. Kept alive for men in America and Europe – so they could be consumed again and again, out of sight, out of mind.

After Elizabeth finished her first dozen interviews she went to talk with the haughtily indifferent girl she suspected of being on the inside. She had no name, she said, and her silence implied she had no existence.

“Where are you from?” asked Elizabeth.

No answer, only an insipid, almost vapid shrug.

“You should answer me, you know? If you don’t, well, you simply go to jail until you do.”

Again, the quietly defiant shrug.

“You think your people in New York will come for you?”

A slight smirk, a quick, sidelong glance of the eye.

“That maybe they’ll get you out so you won’t have to talk to me?”

“You don’t know what you’re dealing with,” the girl said, her English clear and perfect.

“Oh? Enlighten me?”

“Let me go now and you may yet live. Keep me and you’ll be dead by nightfall.”

“Oh? And who do you think will pull that off?”

The insolence on the girl’s face was almost too much for Elizabeth, but she looked into the girl’s eyes, tried to feel her way inside this lost soul, yet she found nothing there – only a darkening void.

“So, you take these girls down to the Village? They already have masters, is that it?”

“And you are dead.”

“No, Mai Ling, I am very much alive and, actually, I have your Passport. The FBI is en route, as is a representative of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And, as you are in a world of trouble I thought I’d give you an opportunity to tell me what you know before the, uh, well, the professionals start in on you…”

A rattled veneer now, a sudden, tectonic shift deep within the girl’s magmatic core.

“The truck driver? Your brother? You do know he’s dead, don’t you? Are you sure you don’t want to talk to me before the FBI gets here? You do realize the danger you are in, don’t you? Your family? What they’ll do to you now that we have these girls?”

Deeper cracks in her veneer, sudden tremors passing across her face like shadows of clouds.

“Your family in Queens? And in Kowloon? All that in jeopardy now. Unless you talk. I can help, you know?”

“You?” the girl cried, the word full of mocking scorn. “You have no idea what you’ve stumbled on, do you? This is just the tip of the iceberg…”

“Really? And what if you’re just a frightened little girl, a girl afraid of the dark.”

They talked for hours after that – while two detectives from the Vermont State Police took notes.

Melissa sat in Altair’s cockpit after Ted left, looking past the bow to the trees that lined the cove, but she appeared lost now. Lost and vulnerable. All she could see in her mind’s eye was the spreading disease within his leg. Black streaks, like lightning gone terribly wrong, and hot to the touch. She’d never seen anything like it but she knew it was evil, that something was coiled up inside of him waiting to strike, and she was afraid because she knew he was going to die. So much was riding on him now – and he was going to die. And now, suddenly, she felt quite helpless to stop this runaway train.

Then she heard Tracy coming up the companionway ladder and she tensed.

“Think you could run me across to the store?” Tracy asked.

“Sure, but there’s no bus service over there. Only seaplanes. Kind of expensive, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh,” the girl said, lost now, and not a little confused.

“So. Who are you running from?”

“Excuse me?”

“Running? Who from? Daddy? A boyfriend? Who?”

The girl turned away, shrugged.

“And? What happens if they find you?”

Tracy shrugged again, then sighed – as really, there was no point in lying now. “I guess they kill me.”

“You know their distribution network, I assume?”

Again the girl nodded, only now she turned and looked at Melissa. “How’d you know?”

“Oh, I’ve met you before. Not you, but girls like you. Caught in the trap, nowhere to turn, no place to run.”

“Dime a dozen, huh?”

“Something like that. Do you want to go home?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he abuse you?”

She nodded her head a little, a barely perceived, mouselike little motion, almost a denial, yet not quite.

“What about your mum?”

“She was always too afraid.”

“I know, but there’s no need to blame her, you know? Caught in the same trap, I guess.”

“You too?” Tracy asked.

And Melissa shrugged. “Not really, but yeah, I know where you’re coming from.”

“Do you?”

“I’ve helped a few girls in your shoes.”

“Oh, have you?” Tracy said, but there was a layer of scorn in her voice that hung over them both.

“I’d like to think so, yes.”

“Yes, I rather imagine you might like that. Who are you running from, by the way? Boyfriend, or husband?”

“Not that simple, Tracy.”

“It never is, luv. Until it is.”

“When was the last time you thought you were made? Before this week, I mean.”

“About a year ago, in San Francisco. The people running me are tied to the cartels now.”

“No way out in California, is there?”

“No. I always thought I could hide there, but…”

“There’s always someone coming around the next corner, isn’t there?”

“That’s right. Always.”

“Did you tell Ted this part?”

“No, course not. I knew someone was on to me last week like, knew it was time to move again…”

“And along comes Ted.”

“And Jim,” Tracy added.

“Ah, so it’s him that interested you?”

“Until you fuckin’ came along, yeah.”

“Funny how things turn out, isn’t it?”

“Do you know how to sail this thing?”

“Sort of, but not really,” Melissa lied, suddenly realizing she was in imminent mortal danger. “The systems on this boat are…well, I have no idea how to run a boat this complex.”

The girl looked towards the seaplane base across the way. “I wonder where they fly to?”

“Up and down the coast, small fishing towns for the most part. Think you could hide out someplace like that?”

“Maybe. Got any cash?”

“A few hundred. I could buy your ticket, though. Give you what I’ve got on hand.”

That seemed to make up the girl’s mind. “Let me get my kit, then. I want to be out of here before dark.”

“Did you see someone this morning?”

She nodded her head. “Maybe. At that bakery. Someone I remember from Vancouver.”

Melissa thought about that now. Someone looking for Tracy here – if that was really her name – out here on the sound. And now they knew she was on this boat.

Would she be safe out here by herself, she wondered? And, when would Ted be back?

She was in the Zodiac, waiting, when Tracy came up with her duffel, and they rode across the cove in silence. She tied up at the cove and walked up to the store and bought her a ticket to Campbell River, gave her a few hundred dollars then hurried back to the inflatable before the girl changed her mind.

She tied-off on a cleat and climbed up to the aft deck, then went below to her duffel and pulled out an Inmarsat phone and flipped it on. She entered the encryption key and waited for the green light, then dialed a one-time number and waited for the connection.

“Go,” she heard the man’s voice on the other end.

“She’s on the evening flight from Squirrel Cove to Campbell River. Says she’s spotted someone on her tail, but I didn’t see anyone.”

“Your next move?”

“Stay here, for a few days, at least,” then she explained why.

fiction, all of it…

Corcovado + Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars 3

Posted on October 30, 2017 by adrianleverkuhnwrites

corcovado 3

III

He looked at the chart plotter again, checked their depth carefully as he motored slowly into Squirrel Cove, a convoluted inlet on the southeast side of Cortes Island – and deep inside Desolation Sound. It was almost seven-thirty, and while the sun was still up, somewhere up there behind the clouds, they’d been at it all day – setting sail at four in the morning and pushing-on through one heavy rainstorm after another. Now, with the end of their journey at hand, visibility was down to fifty feet and at ferocious wind, right out of the south at sixty knots, was pushing Altair towards the rocks on the right side of the narrow, westernmost inlet. Tracy looked terrified; Ted looked bored. He knew his father, knew he was enjoying this, the extra challenge at the end of a long, hard day…

A violent gust rocked the boat and he turned Altair into the wind a little, though she rolled more than thirty degrees right for a moment – and Tracy shrieked her displeasure then, now, suddenly, beyond terrified. Yet Altair stood up again and he added power, his eyes now fixed on the chart plotter…and the way ahead.

“Another hundred yards or so and we’ll be out of this wind,” he said for Tracy’s benefit – just as another gust slammed into Altair, sending her almost on her beam.

“Jesus, Dad, the wind gauge hit ninety…!” Ted called out, but he was still focused on the rocky ledge about fifteen meters ahead – because these gusts were pushing him right for it…

He waited for the wind to settle a little, then slipped the transmission into reverse and backed down hard, his rudder to starboard a little, and as Altair’s bow pointed away from the ledge he put the transmission in forward again and gunned the engine, kicking the old girl with his spurs on one more time. A minute later they were inside the sheltering cove, and the wind, just as he said it would, fell off to the gentlest breeze imaginable.

“Get the eighty pound ready first,” he said, quietly, to his son, and Ted ran off to the bow to get the anchor ready to drop. “How you doin’, kiddo?” he added, looking at the disbelief in Tracy’s eyes.

“How did you do that?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“Get us in here…?”

“Badly, I’m afraid. I should have anticipated those last two gusts.”

“Badly?”

“Yeah. Sorry about that…that really could’ve gone smoother,” he sighed, but his eyes were on the plotter again. He overlaid radar on the display and he could see the contours of the cove now, and every boat anchored inside, too, even though visibility in the heavy rain was still under fifty meters. He changed range scales and fiddled with the gain setting, knocking back the rain-clutter, then he saw a likely place near the far east end of the cove.

Ted had the eighty pounder on the roller now, ready to go, and he waved him back to the cockpit. “No reason for you to stand out there,” he said as his cold, wet son clambered back into the cockpit.

“How far?”

“‘Bout a half mile, and I don’t think this rain is gonna let up anytime soon.”

“What’s the forecast look like?”

“More of the same, like maybe two, three more days.”

“Swell,” Ted grumbled. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

“It’s pretty here,” Tracy sighed, peering into the murk. “Nothing but trees…”

“Oh,” he said, grinning, “there’s more here than meets the eye.”

“Like?”

“You’ll see,” Ted added, though he was grinning now, too.

“What’s the big mystery,” she whined.

He looked at the plotter, confirmed there were no wayward currents pushing him around inside the cove, then he looked up, checked the radar against the boats he saw looming out of the mist and rain just ahead. “About three hundred yards, Ted.”

“I’m gonna get another fleece, my gloves, too.”

He powered back a little, turned away from a group of boats anchored along the south side of the cove, then noted several were rafted-up together, forming a sort of floating community out here in the middle of nowhere…then Ted was bounding out into the rain again. He picked his spot and throttled down, let Altair drift to a long, arcing stop, then he toggled the windlass and let the anchor down…slowly…and then, when Ted gave him the signal, he backed down until he felt the anchor set.

He shut down the engine, marveled at the quiet of this place once again – even as he listened to the wind through the pines and rain pelting the cockpit enclosure…then he noticed Tracy looking at him.

“Does anything bother you?” she asked.

“What?”

“That storm…the rocks…you could’ve lost your boat, maybe our lives, but it was like you were, well, on heroin. Nothing seems to upset you…”

“People get in trouble when they panic. When they stop thinking the problem through, when they just start acting. That’s probably the first thing a student pilot learns, too, by the way.”

“So, that’s it? You run into things like this all the time, so it’s like…just no big deal? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yup.”

“What happens if you screw up?”

“People die.”

+++++

He opened his eyes, looked around. Navy gray everywhere, and ductwork…the thrum of air conditioning and heavy machinery buried deep within the bowels of the living, breathing ship. A medic of some sort fiddling with his bandaged leg, then adjusting an IV hanging from a tree over his face.

“Oh…you’re awake…”

“If this isn’t a dream,” he replied, “I am.”

“No, sir, Lieutenant, no dreams allowed in here.”

“Where am I?”

“Back on the Roosevelt, sir. Docs operated on both legs, and turned out that snake’s venom was pretty mild, like maybe he didn’t get a good strike or somethin’, but I’ll go get the doc…”

He nodded, then looked down at his legs and shook his head. “Fuck,” was about all he could think to say, then he just stared ahead until a man in blood-splattered green scrubs came up to his gurney.

“Guess you had a helluva night, Lieutenant.”

“What happened?”

“Beats me. By the time the Seals got to you, well, you were out cold and seriously fucked up. Good thing you powdered that wound on your right leg…that shard got close to, well, let’s just say you had a close call and we’ll leave it at that.”

“And?”

“We still don’t know what kind of snake got you. One of the Seals got it with an M16, brought back some pieces so we could ID the thing. I think what saved you was, well, your vascular network down there was already pretty compromised, so the venom just couldn’t spread. It’s responding to anti-histamines so it’s probably a hemotoxin, so it wasn’t a cobra or something like that.”

“When can I get back to flight status?”

“Well, that’s the good part. No fractures and no major muscle damage, so assuming no infection I’d give it about two months…”

“Two…MONTHS?”

“Believe me, Lieutenant, when you get on your feet again you’ll realize how close a call you really had…”

“Can I go back to my quarters now…” he asked, clearly perturbed.

“You’re leaving for Germany on the next COD,” the physician added, “then stateside.”

The squad CO, Dan Green, came in a few minutes after the doc left, and Green looked at his leg for a while, then came closer. “Close one, Jim. You remember what happened?”

“First SAM – went wide right, the second went just aft. What about the Sukhois? Did I get ‘em?”

“Yeah, you sure did. Nothing got airborne, and the base is history. We got some Seals in there to secure the place this morning. It’s a done deal now, anyway. Saddam’s people are bugging out, disappearing into the hills, and their air force is, well, they split too, flew to Iran.”

“Iran? I thought…”

“Everyone thought they’d go to Jordan. They didn’t.”

“So, what? They’re just going to sit this one out?”

“Guess none of them felt like being martyred this week, if you know what I mean.”

“I guess, yeah.”

“So, they tell me you’re headed to Wiesbaden?”

“Can you talk to someone, Dan? No broken bones…shit…I ought to be ready to fly in a few days.”

Green laughed at that. “Hell, Jim, this thing is going to be over in a few days, for us, anyway. They’re already talking about moving a couple of the carriers back out to the Indian Ocean, maybe to the Med. Seems like Saddam is getting ready to shoot off some Scuds, and the thinking is he might try to hit Israel.”

“Too bad for him if he does.”

“Yeah, anyway, by the time they get that leg fit for duty we’ll probably be back at Pearl. I wouldn’t sweat it, but if it heats up again you’ll be ready to go. You’re a short-timer, aren’t you? You weren’t thinking of extending?”

“I wasn’t, until this thing. My hitch is up in June.”

“Call it four months, then? Well, who knows. If we’re still here in a few weeks I’ll put in a request. About all I can do, Jim.”

“Thanks, Skip.”

“Yeah. Well, some of the ground-pounders wanted to talk to you…”

“The Seals? Great…!”

And with that, five men came into the compartment.

“Hey, L-T!” their CO said as he led his men into the little compartment. That was some mean shootin’ you did out there…”

“Shooting?”

“That cat. You nailed it, right in the throat. Dropped him like a sack of potatoes. Pretty good for a 1911 – at that range, anyway.”

“Cat?”

“Yeah, that spotted thing. Looks like a leopard, only it’s not. Some kind of swamp-cat…but man, you got him…”

“All I remember is the snake…coiled up by my feet…”

“Yeah, he was still there when we got to you. Hernandez got him, emptied a whole fuckin’ magazine into his fat ass, too.”

He looked around at the Seal team and nodded. “Thanks, men. Appreciate your laying it out there for me.”

He heard their chorus of “You bets…” and “No problemos,” then they were gone, Green too, and he felt himself coming down hard and fast now.

“Germany…?” he sighed. “Well, at least I can call the folks from there, and Babs, let ‘em know I’m okay…”

Then the throbbing started.

By the time he arrived in Germany his right leg was splotchy blue and the docs told him some kind of bug had gotten into the tissues of his lower leg…something from that swampy marsh…

“A bug?”

“Yeah. They get in through the wound, find their way into the space between the muscle and your skin. They multiply like crazy in there.”

“And?”

“We try antibiotics, three or four of ‘em, over the next 24 hours.”

“We try? And what happens if they don’t work?”

And the doc shook his head. “Let’s not go there right now…okay?”

+++++

Tracy was shivering and Ted was almost as white as snow when they came in from setting the anchors, so, as much as he didn’t want to, he fired up the generator then turned on the cabin heaters. He set about making dinner then, though he kept his eyes on the weather every few minutes. The forecast was for almost freezing temps overnight, the mid-30s, anyway – and that was for Vancouver! – yet three days from now sunny and in the 70s.

“What a roller coaster…” he sighed as he turned to the chicken in the skillet.

“What’s for chow?” Ted asked as he came out of the aft cabin.

“Lettuce wraps and that coconut soup you like.”

“Ah…nothing like Thai on a rainy night.”

“You’re cooking Thai food?” Tracy asked. “On a boat?”

“Why not?” he replied. “It’s not that difficult, and it doesn’t take long.”

“Lettuce wraps?” she added. “Really?”

“Sure. I washed the lettuce and made the soup this afternoon. All I have to do is grind the chicken and put the soup in the microwave.”

“The microwave? You have one of those, too?”

He shook his head – again – then turned to the stove – again. He added lemongrass and basil, and finally one crushed cardamom pod, then he turned down the heat and let the chicken simmer for a while. “Tea’s ready, if anyone wants some.”

“Don’t tell me,” Tracy sneered. “Fresh chai?”

“Yup.”

“This is ridiculous,” she sighed. “This is like a floating restaurant…”

“You’d rather I opened a can of dog food for you?” he asked, trying to keep calm.

“I just don’t get it,” the girl said. “Getting away from it all…”

“Doesn’t mean I have to deprive myself of the things I like to eat, Tracy. You forget. This is my home, and the idea of living like a backpacker doesn’t appeal to me all that much.”

She nodded. “Yeah…I get that…”

Ted was rummaging through a pantry about then, and he stood up, beaming, holding forth a can: “Dad! Look! Pork and beans, with weenies, even! Trace? Want some?”

She sneered again. “No thanks.”

Ted looked at his old man – and winked.

She helped with the dishes, and he let her know he appreciated the help, then he went to the chart table and looked over the batteries.

“Gonna have to run the generator all night?” Ted asked.

“With this water temp the fridge and freezer won’t draw too much, but the heater? That won’t run off batteries.”

“So? We’ve got good blankets…”

“Yeah? At 36 degrees and with three bodies in here there will be enough condensation on the ceiling in the morning to take a shower with…”

“Dad? We’re like, ya know, laying down a smoke-screen out there. The fumes are overwhelming.”

“So?”

“Well, do the words ‘pristine’ and ‘wilderness’ ring any bells?”

“Does freezing your ass off all night mean anything to you? Then dealing with an unholy mess in the morning?”

“I vote for warm,” Tracy said, tossing her two cents into the up. “I kind of like warm.”

“Me too,” he said. “Don’t you just love democratic systems of governance, Paco?”

Ted sighed, shook his head. “I like warm, too. I also hate turning this harbor into a cesspool. Like, we came here to get away from all that crap?”

“Right, Paco. Who’s up for a movie?”

“Movies?” Tracy said…and he sighed – then turned the generator to AUTO and flipped the heater to STAND-BY – and complete silence enveloped Altair…and the entire cove, for that matter.

And moments later he heard cheers and applause coming from all the boats anchored around Altair, and he shook his head as he retreated into his cabin.

He slept late – ‘til three a.m., anyway – then he got up – shivering – and turned on the generator, then the heater. He put on coffee and took his shower, then fired up the chart table and looked over the current weather. “Wind still out of the south, at forty, forty-five, and rain all day. A high of fifty-five? Well, well, well…sounds like a good day to read.”

He decided to check on Ted and poked his head in the aft cabin – and saw Tracy curled up by his son’s side.

He closed the door gently and tip-toed to the galley, trying not to grin, then he put on some hot water to make that tea-like crud Tracy was using to help back off the heroin. He got out “her” cup and added the recommended amount and let it steep for a while, then he went back to her room and woke her.

“Is it time already?” she asked, and he nodded.

He went back to the galley and a few minutes later she came out, looked at him getting ready to cook breakfast and she walked up behind him, put her arms around him.

“Good morning,” she said, then she disengaged and walked to the main table in the saloon and sat – as usual, tucking her bare feet under her thighs.

“Sleep well?” he asked, handing her the mug.

She looked at him and grinned. “I wish I’d known he was a virgin,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “I’d have baked him a cake or something…”

He shrugged. “All things being equal, I’m kind of glad it was you.”

She teared up at that, then turned away. “Me?” she said a minute later. “The lying heroin addict?”

“Sorry. That’s not the girl I know. I know this girl named Tracy, the one who meets problems head-on, and doesn’t quit.”

“That’s not the girl I know.”

He shrugged again, then smiled at her. “Looks like were in for a long, rainy day. You like to read?”

“Depends…”

“Well, I’ve got a few books stowed for a rainy day…”

“You said you have movies?”

“Yup. On my laptop. Play ‘em through that iMac over there,” he said, pointing.

“Do you have any oldies?”

“Oldies? How old does a movie have to be before it’s an oldie? The first Star Wars, maybe?”

She grinned at that. “No, I mean old…like Elvis kind of old.”

“Ah. Well, I do have Paradise, Hawaii Style, if that counts?”

“Which one’s that?”

“He plays the fired airline pilot who comes home…”

“That figures,” she said, grinning. “I bet you have The High and The Mighty, too.” And he started whistling John Wayne’s iconic theme at that, and she broke out laughing. “My God, you do have a one-track mind, don’t you?”

“You could say that.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask…what happened to your leg? The right one, there?” she said, pointing.

He turned away from her question, went back to the galley. “Just a bad night,” he said as he pulled out a skillet. “A bad night, a long time ago.”

“Was it serious?”

“No, not really.”

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

“No, not really.”

“Okay. Can I help?”

“I’m just gonna whip up some breakfast. You hungry?”

“Actually, yes. Want me to wake up Ted?”

“Just see if he wants to get up yet…”

She walked past, brushed up against his back as she passed and a chill went up his back, and he leaned forward, put his outstretched hands on the counter and closed his eyes, trying to remember the last time he’d been so attracted to another human being…

+++++

“Hey, Pumpkin,” he said as he came into their apartment. He was carrying his flight bag in one hand, his car keys in the other, and he could hear Barbara working away in the apartment’s tiny kitchen, so he put his bag down and walked in. He could smell bourbon and the realization unsettled him – if only because it was not quite lunch time.

“How was your night?” she asked.

“Long.”

“Ben Chambers called this morning. He wants you to call-in as soon as you get settled.”

“Oh? Did he say anything?”

“Nope. You want to grab a shower? Lunch will be ready in about ten minutes…”

“Yeah. I’d better,” he said, thinking he might have to run back out to the training center after lunch. He walked into the bedroom and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. Something didn’t feel right, he thought. Something was – off.

He shook it off and hopped in the shower, washing away the night – and the sudden panicky vibration gripped him again, then he dried and got dressed…in a hurry. She had huevos rancheros and fresh guacamole on the table and he dug in. “Jeez, darlin’ – you’re getting better and better at these…”

“Thanks, Jim. Glad you like ‘em.”

“Well, I love you, Pumpkin. It’s sweet of you to do this for me. When do you go in?”

“Three to midnight again. You off tomorrow?”

“Three days off, then I start Atlanta to CDG – for three months, anyway.”

“Paris…? Think we could spend a long weekend there?”

“You know it, babe.”

She sat beside him, leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, then she smiled. “That could be fun,” she added…a little too suggestively.

“Where would you like to stay?”

“I don’t care…somewhere old, away from… No. Maybe by Notre Dame. Are there any hotels over by that part of town?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I can ask one of the guys when I start…”

“Could you?”

“Sure. You need help with the dishes?”

“No…you’d better go make your call,” she said, and he nodded, went to their bedroom again, and again, the hair on the back of his neck shot up in electric warning.

He shook it off, called Chambers’ office at the training center and held while someone went to find him.

“Jim? You haven’t put on your pajamas yet, have you?”

“No, sir. What’s up?”

“An opportunity, I think, if you’re up to it?”

“Oh?”

“Listen up. Word is headquarters is dead set on unloading most of our widebodies, including the L-1011s. I don’t know what the timeline is yet, but even if we keep the TriStars around you’re way back on the seniority list. It could be ten years before you get to the left seat, and then what? You make it just as we dump the type? Then what?”

“Jeez, Ben. When’d you hear this?”

“Couple days ago. Look, I know you’re getting ready to start this week, so here goes. We’re getting our first 752s in this year, and from what I hear management is really going to get behind this hull. I’m thinking, with your experience you could make captain in two, maybe three years, and the 57 is Delta’s future. You hearin’ me?”

“I am. And, what’s the punchline?”

“Our first school starts in three weeks. You can start the Paris run as scheduled, put in your app and wait, but I think they’ll take you.”

“What do I need to do?”

“I’d get down here pronto and get the paperwork in.”

“Like, this afternoon?”

“Like yesterday, Jim. The word’s out. Tomorrow will be too late for the first group of FOs.”

“I’ll be there in an hour,” he said as he hung up the phone, and when he turned around Barbara was standing in the doorway, glowering at him.

And that’s when he noticed the used condom on the floor by her shoes. He looked at it for the longest time, then he picked it up and carried it right past her on his way to the bathroom. He flushed it down the toilet, washed his hands then left – without saying a word to her.

He missed the smile on her face as the door closed behind him.

+++++

“Two days of this rain is enough, Paco. I’ve had it. You ready to run down to Nancy’s, grab some chow?”

“Oh, man, I thought you’d never ask!”

“Is Nancy’s that place you two keep talking about?” Tracy asked.

“Nancy’s is only the best place for breakfast on earth,” Ted sighed, suddenly almost salivating.

“And what that really means,” he added, “is that he’s tired of my cooking.”

“I’m not,” Tracy said, smiling.

“Well, I am,” he said. “I could use a break. You ready to pull up the hook?”

“You wanna leave now?” Ted asked.

“Yup. Maybe we can get there before the early morning rush.”

“The early morning rush?” Ted croaked. “In Lund, B.C.?”

“You see all these boats anchored here, Paco? Well, there are probably two hundred more over in Gorge Harbor, and in about an hour they’re all gonna wake up and have the exact same thought – at the exact same time. My-oh-my, but a fresh cinnamon roll over at Nancy’s sure sounds good!”

“Alright, alright…let me grab my gloves, Captain Bligh.”

“Good. I’ll warm up the diesel.” He preheated the water lines and flipped on the spreader lights, then went to the cockpit and started the engine, watching the gauges as it warmed. When Ted pulled up on the trip-line and gave him the thumbs-up, he ran the windlass, pulling the anchor, and it’s chain, up onto deck, and he verified their position on the plotter while he turned to leave the cove.

Light rain and a wind-driven, four-foot chop greeted them outside, and he set his course to 1-5-6 and engaged the auto-pilot, then went topsides to roll out the headsails. When both were pulling he and Ted raised the main, then he ducked below and fell off the wind a little, letting the sails fill, then he fiddled with the heading on the AP for a while, until a gust hit and Altair heeled over dramatically.

“Whoa!” Tracy shouted, grabbing the cockpit coaming and holding on for dear life. “Where’d that come from?”

He chuckled. “Where did what come from?”

She scowled as she looked at him, then she smiled too. “It is kind of fun, isn’t it?”

“Kind of.” With her port-side rail over far enough to ship water in the troughs, Altair bit into the wind and began racing south towards Lund, and still the sun was nowhere to be seen. The sky was simply sifting through shades of gray as night turned to day, and the water looked impossibly black out here…like India ink. He saw the lights of a fishing boat ahead, and a few channel markers were flashing in the darkness, but there was almost nothing else…

“Dad! Logs!”

He saw them then – almost invisible in the rolling waves – a half dozen trees had broken loose from their raft and were adrift mid-channel, so he fell off the wind and they picked their way through what turned out to be several hundred fifty-to-seventy-foot-long timbers, knocked free from their rafts by the storm, so he did what he thought best and called the hazard in to the Canadian Coast Guard…

It took two hours to make the run down to Lund after that, and he was more than ready for a cinnamon roll, too, by the time they tied off at the nearby fuel dock. He was stressed now, afraid of hitting an errant log and holing the hull, maybe losing his home.

“Stayin’ long?” the owner, a very old man asked, and when he pointed to Nancy’s the old guy just smiled and nodded. “Take your time. No crowds ‘til nine or so. See many logs out?”

“Yeah…hundreds…”

“I heard some guy called ‘em in to the Coast Guard. That’s a laugh…”

“A laugh?”

“They’re too busy running down the druggies to do much about it. Besides, happens every summer up here…”

“Oh? I’ve been up here a few times, never seen it so bad.”

“They’ve been cuttin’ trees like nothin’ I’ve seen before, and all winter, too. China, I guess. They’re building like crazy over there – and usin’ our lumber to do it, I reckon.”

“Lot of drug running up here?”

“Non-stop. Word is most of it’s comin’ from North Korea, too. Chinese heroin, I’ve heard, for the most part. That’s kind of funny, don’t you think?”

“China has made an art out of playing both sides of the street – for a long time.”

“Playin’ us the fool, too, and laughing all the way to the bank.”

He shook his head then went about topping off both tanks, but he turned to Ted then and told them to go on up and get a table.

“Want a roll?” Ted asked.

“Yup…”

“Need water?” the old guy asked. “The hose is right here…I can watch the pump if you want to top off your tanks…”

He was chilled – and soaked to the bone – by the time he made it inside Nancy’s, and he made it to the table just as his cinnamon roll arrived.

“Coffee, sir?” their waitress asked.

“Yup. A big one, French roast if you’ve got it. You know what? Make mine a latte, if you can.”

She nodded, smiled at him and walked off to the counter.

“Man,” Ted began, “that’s some snotty weather, Dad…I don’t know about this…”

“Not the weather that bugs me, Paco. It’s all the wood out there…”

“Wouldn’t they just bounce off?” Tracy asked. “It’s just wood…?”

“Maybe, if you hit one just right, but that wood is soaked with water, almost as hard as iron. Odds are, I think, a strike would knock a hole in the hull. A big one.” Her eyes went wide as she realized what they’d just been through, how close they’d come to a real emergency, then she looked away – out to sea. “Talking to the guy at the dock,” he continued, “he says this is the worst summer for rafts breaking up, ever. Been a lot of incidents in the main channel, too.”

“What do we do?” Ted asked, his mouth scrunched up into a lopsided frown.

“Well, for one, I think when we leave we’ll head back slowly, only on days when the visibility is good, and only in daylight. Next…we’ll have to set a bow watch.”

“Oh…joygasm…” Ted sighed, knowing what that meant.

“We won’t head back until this weather clears, and it’s warmed up a bit…man, these cinnamon rolls haven’t changed one bit, have they?”

“I just saw a yummy looking bagels and lox,” Tracy said. “I’m gonna get that.”

He looked at her, wondered just how much she could put away. She’d been eating non-stop for the last two days, nauseated if she didn’t eat, and he felt for her. Again…

“Yeah, it looked pretty bad,” Ted added.

“Bad?” he asked.

“Bad…sick…that means they really kick ass these days, Dad.”

“Ah. Well, good to know I have a translator.”

The door opened and a girl came in – a woman, really, he noted. Short, squat, almost soft looking, and she peeled off her rain gear – then turned and shook them off just outside the door. She came back in and hung them on a hook, then took a microfiber cloth and cleaned her eyeglasses as she walked to the counter – and he found he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

The place was empty now – but for the four of them and the staff, and he wondered what had gotten her out so early. He watched her order coffee at the counter then she turned and looked right at him – right in the eye – and he couldn’t turn away.

Red hair, white skin set in a nebula of freckles, and even across the room he could see her eyes were deep blue – then the woman walked right up to their table…!

“You came in on the blue boat, right?” she asked – and her accent was pure Georgia, thick as molasses.

He was watching her lips, entranced by the shape of them as she spoke, then her words registered. “That’s right. What brings you out this early in the morning?”

She looked puzzled hearing that, shook her head. “I was trying to get over to Cortes Island,” she said, the question she wanted to ask hanging in the air, apparent.

“Oh? What’s over there?”

And again she shook her head, the tone of his question obviously unsettling. “Seals, for the most part. I wanted to take pictures of seals over there, because I’ve heard it’s lovely at dusk.”

“It might be,” Ted interjected, “if the sun came out every once in a while.”

She laughed a little at that. “Yes. Nice weather so far.”

“How long have you got?” he asked.

“Excuse me?” she replied.

“To spend on the island?”

“I was hoping to make it a day trip, but it seems that’s impossible from here.”

“Yup,” he added. “About a two-hour trip. From here, anyway.”

“You’ve been?”

“Yup. We’ve been anchored at Squirrel Cove…”

“Really! That’s just where I wanted to go. The pictures I’ve seen of the area are really just amazing.”

“We had fifty-foot visibility,” Ted began, a little sarcastically. “Great for looking at, what, Dad? What could we see?”

“Trees. Once.”

“And a whole lot of fog,” Ted added.

Her coffee came and she took it, still standing by their table.

“Would you care to join us?” he asked.

“You wouldn’t mind?”

“Not at all.”

“So, you see, I wanted to get to the island, walk around, take pictures, then get back here, to the hotel…”

“I thought there was a boat to Whaletown…?”

“There is, but not for two days.”

Not too many places to stay over there, by that cove,” he added. A few guest cottages, but they’re…”

“Well, it’s too early in the season. Not open yet.”

“So,” he said, then he paused, thought over the options running through his mind, “you could hop over with us. We’re headed back after breakfast, we’ll probably stay for a few more days, so you could look for a place to bunk out over there, then hitch a ride back with us.”

“You wouldn’t mind?”

“No, of course not.”

“When are you leaving?”

“As soon as we have some chow.”

“I ask as I’ll need to go pack my things and check-out…”

“Why don’t you sit down and have some breakfast. We’ll help with your bags…”

And when she looked at him this time the still, unsettled look in her eyes rattled him. “I don’t mean to be forward,” he added. “Probably just be easier that way.”

She nodded her head then looked at the dock where Altair was tied-off. “Is she an Island Packet?” she asked.

“That’s right. How’d you know?”

“I’ve had a couple. Last was a 325 I kept down at Destin.”

“I hate that harbor entrance,” he said, lost in a memory. “When the wind picks up it’s snarky.”

Now it was her turn to take a deeper look – at him. “You’ve been there more than once, I take it?”

“My folks retired there. He kept a Tashiba 40 down there by the pass.”

“Oh? Nice boats, beautiful interiors.”

He nodded. “Yup.”

“That’s what got you into sailing? Your parents?”

“I guess so, yes, but I was always interested, even as a kid…”

He looked at Ted just then, looked at Ted looking at this stranger, then back at him. And his son was grinning, or trying not to grin…and that got to him…as in – just what kind of signals am I putting out?

“So,” the woman asked. “This is your first boat?”

“Yup. Probably my last, too.”

“Really? Why do you…”

“Well, it’s home now. And I’m not big on moving.”

“You’re full time? A liveaboard?”

“Seems to be the general consensus,” he said, grinning.

“What do you do?”

“I fly, for Delta.”

That seemed to take her back a notch, too. “No kidding?”

“No kidding.”

“My husband flew for them…I mean, my ex-husband flies for them?”

“Oh? What’s his name?”

“Terry Goodway…”

And he laughed at that. “Small world,” he sighed. “He flew with me a bunch when he first got his type. What’s he up to these days.”

“I don’t know, besides hanging out with his brand new, nineteen-year-old wife.”

And he laughed again. “You’re kiddin’ – right?” But he could tell by the expression on her face that no, she wasn’t kidding. Not in the slightest. “I’m sorry,” he stumbled, “but I don’t recall your name.”

“Melissa.”

“Jim,” he said, reaching out with his right hand.

She took it, but at the same time added: “And let me guess. Your wife got the house, and you got stuck with the boat…?”

Ted bristled. “Not quite,” his son snarled, his voice dripping with malice. “Dad gave her the house, and he took the boat.”

“Oh, really?” Melissa said, her disbelief plain to see.

“Really!” Ted said – as he pushed his chair back and walked outside.

“Wow, sorry…” the woman said. “He’s…uh…”

“Pretty sensitive about things right now. It happened not long ago.”

“And, well, still waters run deep, I guess. What happened, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“She’s had issues. We decided it was a good time to go our separate ways.”

And she looked at him again, this time as if she was changing her mind, then she looked at Tracy.

“And you are?”

“Staying out of this,” Tracy said, matter-of-factly.

“No, dear. Do you have a name?”

“No, not right now I don’t.”

“Ah, well,” Melissa said, looking at him, “perhaps I’d better let you and your happy brood go your merry way.”

He stood as she stood, then held out his hand again. “Nice to meet you. Hope you get to your island.”

“Thanks,” she said, then she went back out into the early morning drizzle.

He watched her go, saw Ted walk up to her and he watched them talk for a few minutes, then they shook hands and Ted came back inside.

“What was that all about?” he asked.

“Nothing. I just needed to clear the air.”

“Okay.”

The rest of their breakfast passed in near silence, and when it was time to pay-up he went to the counter and had more cinnamon rolls boxed-up to-go, some bread, too, then they walked down to the fuel dock together.

Melissa was there, a large blue duffel at her feet, waiting for them.

+++++

He was waiting outside the operating room, pacing back and forth in quick, anxious strides. She was eight months pregnant – but had gained almost a hundred and ten pounds – and now her blood pressure was off the charts. 223 over 130 earlier that afternoon – when someone at her office had insisted she go to the hospital, and when her obstetrician arrived she’d insisted they try to induce labor, or, failing that, take the baby before he was compromised.

He’d been somewhere over Florida when the SELCAL chimed, someone on the company frequency calling. He’d taken the news calmly, outwardly at least, but he was hurt, almost angry as he listened to the chief pilot telling him what was happening. He’d done everything he could to get her to stop eating, had cooked the healthiest meals he knew how – only to find out she’d been eating several candy bars – an hour – all day at work. She was, he understood now, content to not merely kill herself. She was going to take as many people down with her as she could, and he wondered what he might try next.

At least he’d gotten her off the sauce. He’d begged her to do at least that much, at least until the baby came, and she’d relented, promised him she wouldn’t – until he came.

Pacing the floor he had wondered…had she scarfed down the most damaging crap in the world simply to put on as many pounds as possible – so she could resume drinking that much sooner? Had his faith in her fallen so low? Had his faith in himself fallen so far…?

Her doc came out a while later, told him that both she and their son were alright now, that the boy was a little premature but nothing serious, and he had fallen away inside the moment, tried to hang on to that one bit of good news for as long as he could.

She let him know, in no uncertain terms, that she had no intention at all of staying home with Ted, not even for breastfeeding, and he’d simply nodded.

“You’re going back to work, I take it?”

“That’s right,” she said – bitterly. “And don’t you dare try to stop me!” she’d screamed.

“Oh, I wouldn’t think of it, Barbara,” he’d whispered, then he’d gone to change the boy’s diaper. Later that morning he called his mother, told her what was happening. She’d flown up that night, moved into the guest room and taken over – and had never once uttered a bad thing about anything, or anyone. In time he realized that Barbara loved his mother more than she loved her own, this his mother was the mother she’d never known. Babs began watching his mother, learning from her, and in time she learned to love honestly, without condition, perhaps for the first time in her life. On Ted’s second birthday she had promised him she’d never drink again, that she’d try to be a better mother…

And, within a few weeks, she was drinking again.

And his mother came back, resumed her duties while he flew and Barbara worked, then got drunk. Night after night. He tried to get her to seek help, any kind of help, but she would curse him and flee into the night.

In time they, he and Ted, started spending time down in Destin, spending time with his father on Altair. His father’s Altair. When the weather was nice they’d go out the cut and sail offshore, and Ted had always loved those bouncy rides best of all, and other times they had motored down the intra-coastal waterway, all the way to Panama City most trips, then they’d come back by way of the sea.

One day they’d been offshore when Ted spotted a weird, drooping fin of some sort and they’d altered course, gone over to see what it was…

“Oh,” Ted’s grandfather said, “that’s a Thresher shark. Not real dangerous, but he’s pretty weird looking, isn’t he?”

Other days they went out and ran across pods of dolphin and Ted would lean over and reach out for them as they swam alongside; he’d learned early on that his son had fantastic balance, and was fearless, too. He’d held on protectively until Ted was seven or eight, then he knew enough to just let go.

His father had been a pilot, too, in the war. The Big One, as it was called. Flown B-17s over Germany and lived to tell the tale, or so his old man liked to say – when he’d had a few too many, anyway, then he’d come home and gone back to work for his father…at the family’s hardware store in St Johnsbury, in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. He’d married his high school sweetheart and they’d had one girl – and then him, many years later. His sister Becky died when she was in kindergarten, and so he’d learned all about love and loss and life and death – and at an impossibly early age. Lessons, he knew now, that had never slipped away…lessons he’d learned from his father.

When he went away to college, to Boston College, his father had known it was all over, but really, he had known for years. His father had managed to get hold of a Cub, a Piper Cub, and had started teaching his son to fly. They flew the Green Mountains, up and down the Connecticut River Valley and all around Lake Champlain, and before long he knew that’s what his son wanted to do. His father knew all too well, if only because that had been his dream, too.

But there had been the family business lined up against all those distant hopes and dreams, his son taking over the family business chief among them, yet in the end it had been easier to sell out than to hold on a little longer, so his father had done what he had to do, then moved to Florida and settled in for the duration. And somehow Altair had become a part of his father’s new life down there. Not golf, not tennis, not even flying…no, it was sailing – something he’d never imagined his father doing…and yet his old man had taken to it with a vengeance – like a duck to water. His old man had even bought an old Greek fisherman’s cap and had been known to hang out around the docks, talking the talk.

Then Ted came, and Barbara flamed out.

And there he was again, like he’d always been. Shoulder the burden, help as best he could, and that first Altair had become the means to an end. Grandfather and grandson, tied together forever by a boat, and yet he’d not been the only connective tissue holding this family together, because his mother was always there too, always taking on the role Barbara should have…

And that had confused Ted.

Once Ted went to kindergarten, once he learned how other families got on, he’d begun to wonder why his family was so different, and, naturally, soon enough the boy had begun to wonder if it was something he’d done. If it was all his fault.

And, of course, as a new father, he’d never seen it coming.

But his mother had. And she’d done her best to answer all Ted’s questions – but, he knew, it’s never enough.

In time he watched his son grow up in the shadow of benign neglect – on Barbara’s part – and an almost smothering love – on his own mother’s part – and then one Sunday, against his wishes, his mother had taken Ted to Sunday School.

Corcovado | Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars

Posted on October 25, 2017 by adrianleverkuhnwrites

Corcovado 1

So, while working on Deep End I started work on a new story, a sailing story, of course. I don’t like working on two stories at once – which is why I usually ending up doing just that – but this is a work-in-progress, too, and unfinished (boo-hiss). Still, have fun. I’ll finish this before Deep End, I guess.

The title? A song, of course. I like Sinatra’s version, but there are dozens out there, including a nice one by Queen Latifah (oh, try her rendering of Poetry Man).

So… Pour yourself a Drambuie and settle in, put on some music and have a read.

+++++

Corcovado | Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars

She was gone now. Gone just now, and he was alone in their house, their home, and memories seemed to push in on him.

Twenty-three years together. Gone, down in flames, an assumed destiny reduced to the lowest common denominator by depositions and faultless recriminations. Contrived recriminations, he reminded himself. False memories, misplaced motives.

He heard it first, through a grapevine he’d never known existed, that she was having an affair. Young guy. Some guy who had time on his hands…time enough to take care of her liquid dreams. First, a quiet confrontation, then an equally quiet agreement, and once arrived at it was over – there was nothing left to say, little left to do.

Or…was there? Like…what comes next?

He moved his belongings down to the marina, moved onto the little boat they had sailed on weekends – together. It was big enough, he told himself, to hold onto the things left, the things worth holding onto.

He went to work two days after he moved aboard, drove out to SeaTac, walked to the dispatch office, picked up and scanned through the preflight briefing for the leg to KSLC. He read the met synopsis, checked off the squawks and signed the fuel load-out, then walked through the quiet terminal to the security line. He checked his watch – 4:20 in the morning – while he shuffled through the crew line, then, when he was through, he walked out to the gate and onto the old 757.

All the lights were off – save a few in the galley that cast oblique little pools of blue and amber where the Jetway met the doorway, and he grinned at other memories. How long had it been, he wondered, since he had been the first to board? How long ago had he worn three stripes on his sleeves?

He went to the cockpit and reached into the darkness, feeling for the switch on the overhead panel that would turn on the dome light, but it was second nature now – and had been…for fifteen years. He had to admit…this confined little space was home, his real home. Barbara had never understood that, not really, and had never been willing to share him with this other world. Even if she was proud, in a way, of his calling, she hated him for this one chaste passion.

He sat and started flipping switches, activating electrical buses and checking ground power status, then he started entering data in the old girl’s nav system. He heard a couple of flight attendants come aboard, listened to their careless banter – because they assumed they were the first aboard this morning – and he smiled when he heard one of them notice there were lights on in the cockpit.

Then…footsteps.

A knock on the door.

“Captain? You here already?”

He turned, looked at Marcy Stewart and smiled. “Yup. That seems to be the case.”

“Can I get you some coffee, Jim?”

“No thanks, darlin’,” he said. He liked Marcy, had been to her wedding two summers ago and, because her father had recently passed and he had walked her down the aisle, given her away as best he could.

“We heard about Barbara,” she said, walking into the cockpit just a little. “I’m so sorry, Jim.”

He nodded, turned back to the panel and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment – then he felt her standing right behind his seat, her hand on his shoulder.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’m copacetic.”

“How many we got this morning?”

“Looks full. Sorry. No rest for the wicked.”

“Orange juice?”

“Oh…sure. A little one?”

“Comin’ right up.”

He watched the fuel boss supervising the truck for a moment, then heard his FO walk through the galley on his way up…

“So, it’s true,” Will Eberling said as he came in and hung up his coat. “How long you been here?”

“Half hour, maybe.”

“Leave anything for me to do?”

He almost laughed. “Maybe. I hear the aft head portside is clogged. Why don’t you go do some of that plumber shit…”

Eberling ignored that one, contorted his way into the right seat and ran through his procedures, and even managed to set up his FMS in less than ten minutes. “Ready to hit the bricks?” Eberling said when it was time to do their walk-around down on the ramp.

“Starting to rain a little,” he said as he made his way to the galley. It was cold out, too, like not quite 40 degrees yet, and it was still snowing like crazy in Salt Lake. He made it down to the concrete and walked to the number one engine, confirmed oil and hydraulic pressures were good, then he walked around the gears and tires, giving them a practiced look over. When he was finished he walked over to the fuel boss and took the chit, looked it over once and signed it.

Eberling was waiting for him at the metal stairway, looking southeast. Mount Rainier was barely visible – just – in the dim, early morning light, and he stopped and looked into the shades of gray for a while, then they walked up to the vestibule that connected the old girl to this earth.

Marcy was waiting for him, a glass of orange juice in hand when he came back to the pools of light.

“You sure you don’t want something hot?” she asked, looking at the water running off his rain-coat, and his nose.

He took the juice and downed it, shook his head. “Maybe before we shut the door?”

“Got it,” she said.

He noticed the way she looked at Eberling just then. Kind of a “keep an eye on him this morning” look.

“There are no secrets between crew members,” he remembered one of his training captains telling him once – almost thirty years before. Just the opposite of life in the Navy, he’d had to remind himself. Everything was different – again.

Yet there’d been one constant all through his life so far: Barbara. And Ted, he had to remind himself.

She’d been by his side since their second year together, at school. She’d stuck with him when he’d decided to go into the Navy after graduation, and she’d visited while he struggled through OCS, and he couldn’t have finished without her, he knew. She was his future even then, and they knew it. They got married after he finished up at Pensacola, and when they moved to Pearl she seemed to love him all the more for his calling.

But…things change, don’t they? People change, too.

Eberling was calling out the pre-start checklist now, and he woke up the old girl with her old, familiar routines, got her ready for another day in the air. He was on automatic pilot too, and he knew it…going through all the old, easy motions. He didn’t have to think about what he was doing now; all these motions were in deepest muscle-memory. His fingers found switches without any need to look, because every little thing in this cockpit had it’s own sound and feel.

“Yaw dampers – ”

“One and two, check…”

“IRS – ALIGN to NAV…”

“One, check…two…and three…”

He watched the pushback truck line up, felt the slightest jolt as they mated – then he was talking to the ground boss…

“Clear to start One, Captain…”

“Starting one…”

Eberling finished the switch from ground power to internal buses while he kept his hand on the tiller, then the truck was free…

“Delta 217, clear to taxi Bravo to one-six left. You’re number two behind a Scandinavian 340, contact tower one-nineteen-nine. Good day.”

“217 to left and nineteen-nine,” he said – and suddenly, in that moment, he knew he’d be okay. All the weight from the past couple of days slipped from his shoulders and he took a deep breath, shook his head.

“You okay, Jim?” Eberling said – a little too quietly.

“Yup. Five by five.” He watched the taxiway lights slip by – in an order he understood all too well – and he braked when they were still about a hundred yards behind the A340 – while Eberling called out the last items on the pre-takeoff checklist.

He watched the -340 turn onto the active, it’s drooping wings heavy with fuel – then it’s engines ran up and she lumbered down the runway.

“217, taxi to position and hold.”

“217.”

He turned onto the runway, lined up on the centerline, flipped off the taxi-lights, turned on the wing lights…

“217, clear for takeoff, contact departure one twenty decimal four for a Summa One departure.”

“217, 120.4, Summa Four, roger.”

He advanced the throttles to 40%N1 then cut them to idle for a moment, turned on the auto-throttle and the flight director, then engaged the auto-pilot…and the old girl eased down the runway for a few seconds – until she transitioned to full take-off power – then she screamed down the runway and leapt into the sky.

“Positive rate,” he called out, and Eberling raised the gears, then: “One-sixty, slats two. One seven five…clean the wing…”

He watched the autopilot track in on the Summa intersection, then as it made the transition to the Baker City VOR…

He didn’t remember much about that day, only the feeling of normalcy that seemed to come for him so gently, so quietly. He remembered having dinner with Marcy that night, at some raucous place in Malibu. How she’d held his hand after, telling him that it would be alright soon.

“It already is, Marcy.”

She’d nodded once, then looked at him long and hard. “Divorce is like death, Jim. You’ll grieve…”

“No, I won’t. She was cheating on me, Marcy. I won’t grieve over that. I can’t…”

Then she had just nodded her head again. Slowly. Knowingly. Just like Barbara might have…

+++++

And, of course, it hadn’t been quite that simple…because at points both lawyers were trying to run up the hours…but the thing about it was – he didn’t want a fight, and neither did Barbara. She was willing to give him the house and the boat, but then he’d asked “Where the devil will you live? That guy’s apartment?”

And so…he’d let her have the house, because, he told her, he knew she loved it so.

And when she broke into tears and ran into his arms he’d held onto her, instinctively, protectively – just as he had for the past thirty years – then he’d kissed her on top of her head and slipped free, that one last time. He signed some papers a few weeks later and it was a done deal, and somehow it was like the last thirty years had never really happened.

+++++

Altair was inscribed on the boat’s navy blue stern…which was how his son found it that morning. He’d moved the boat from Shilshole Bay Marina to Lake Union a few weeks before, and only remembered to let Ted know the night before, before he boarded his overnight flight in Boston for the trip home. His own flight got in a half hour after Ted’s, and by the time he made it to the dock Ted was already lounging in the cockpit.

“Ah…the prodigal son returns, but – my God…you look just like Jesus! When’s the last time you went to a barbershop…?”

“Hey, Dad. How’s it hangin’?”

“Still down to my knees.”

“Yeah…but does it still work?” Ted quipped as he hopped down to the dock and hugged his ‘old man.’ “Well, at least you still look like you could…”

“You might, too, someday, if we could only get you out of diapers.”

“Ooh…low blow.”

“Get your stuff stowed?”

“Yup. You sure you want me to take the aft cabin?”

“Yeah, I like it up forward. Where I put my stuff when…”

“You really got three weeks off?”

“Almost four. I don’t have to report back until June 28^th, and man-o-man, am I looking forward to some downtime.”

“So? Where we headed?”

“Feel like hitting Desolation Sound?” He watched his son’s eyes light up like a little kid’s and they both smiled, then he looked around the deck. “Got everything you need?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“Did you call your mom? Let her know you’re in…?”

The change that came over his son looked just like a fat summer’s cloud racing across a hot August prairie – bright sunshine to cool, lingering shadow in a heartbeat, then the heat again. Ted was still sorting through his anger, trying to understand her sudden, final betrayal, but he had yet to reconcile with her – said he never would. He had been content to let it go at that while Ted was so far away, but now that he was “home” he was going to have to do something about it. Barbara was still fragile where Ted was concerned.

“No,” was Ted’s final stony, sullen reply.

“Okay.” Which seemed to take the wind out of his son’s sails. “You wanna grab the bowlines while I warm up the motor?”

“Will do.”

A few minutes later he backed out of his slip into Lake Union, and he let Ted take the helm while he tidied up the deck, making Altair ready for sea –

– but first – they’d have to transit Ballard Locks, and Ted had never tackled them before.

So he ran the lines needed while Ted steered down-channel, then he took the wheel when the lock’s entry signal turned green –

“When we get lined-up in there, toss your lines up to the lock-keeper on the dock. He’ll tie us off – our job is to let out line as the water drops and we fall, keeping us off the wall – and the boats around us. It gets pretty turbulent, so brace yourself.”

A half hour later they were running through Shilshole Bay – leaving Seattle in their wake – when the sun broke through early morning, low-scudding cumulus.

“You bring any beer?” his son asked.

“Diet Dr Pepper and chicken salad sammies today.”

“No beer?”

“No beer.”

“Dude…you’re sick.”

“Dude…you’re twenty.”

“But…I thought it was like against the Law of the Sea to leave port without a case of Budweiser.”

“Yup, that’s probably true.”

“So?”

“Sorry, Dude. I’m just not into that stuff.”

“Got any new books, at least?”

“Nope.”

“Jeez, Dad…a month without beer…and no books? You going for the priesthood or something?”

“No. One in the family will be enough.”

Ted looked away. “What makes you say that?” he said a while later.

“Jesuit school, Jesuit college all those theology classes. Or maybe I don’t know you that well.”

“You’re the only person who ever got me, Dad.”

“So…seminary school is next on your horizon?”

“I think so, yeah. But…”

“What about med school?”

“Yeah, that too.”

“Still no girlfriend?”

And again, Ted turned away, lost, trying to find the right words. “I was kinda hoping to try that this summer.”

“Try – what?”

“The whole sex thing. Girls, that kinda thing.”

“Oh,” he said, grinning at the irony. “No girls in Beantown?”

“Just hasn’t been right.”

“I see. Would you grab me a DDP?”

“Sure. Want a sandwich?”

“Nope, not yet.”

He watched his boy amble down the companionway and come back up with four Diet Dr Peppers, and they both downed one in a fast gulp, then opened their second and sipped that one slowly.

“What about that gal from Rhode Island? Didn’t work out?”

Ted shook his head. “She was weird, like she was looking for someone to be her daddy.”

He laughed. “I know the type.”

“Mom?”

“No…a couple of stews I’ve known…”

“Dad!?”

“No, not that. It’s more like I’m a, well, a Father Confessor to a lot of the girls. When they get in trouble it seems they always come to me.”

“Trouble?”

“Abusive boyfriends, husbands. Unwanted pregnancies. That kind of thing. I guess I have that kind of face.”

“You always have.”

“What?”

“As long as I can remember. You remember Pete Baker?”

“The kid with eyes like a smallmouth bass? Used to sleep over weekends?”

“Yup. He thought you were God Almighty Himself. You’d come in from a flight in your uniform and all he wanted to do was stay up all night talking airplanes…”

“So? What are you getting at?”

“Remember when he broke his leg? Playing football?”

“Yeah…we went to see him at the hospital.”

“Yeah. All he wanted was to hear you tell him everything would be alright. Didn’t matter what his mom said. To him, well, you were his dad.”

“What?”

“You didn’t know that, did you? You have no idea how you affect people, none at all. I think that’s what’s so hard to take about you.”

“Hard to take?”

“Yeah. It’s like you’re this high priest, the High Priest of Boeing.”

He laughed at that – for quite a while. “Of Boeing. I like that.”

“Yeah? Well, it’s true. You’ve always had that effect on people. Half the kids from school who came over hoped they’d get a chance to talk to you…”

“About?”

“Anything.”

“I think we need to stop off for some beer.”

“See? There’s a method to my madness.”

+++++

They docked in Friday Harbor that night, and though the sun was still up when Altair entered the little harbor, once the boat was tied-off in the tiny marina they decided to head below and grab some sleep. It was just past two in the morning when he woke up – at his customary time – and headed topside to look things over.

Altair was a chunky forty-five feet long, broad-beamed with an enclosed center cockpit that provided better-than-decent shelter from the often drizzly weather on Puget Sound. The tradeoff with this design was simple enough to understand, however, because while it kept the sun and the wind and the rain out, he had lost the stars, and his most beloved star of all – Altair.

Old habits die hardest, he grumbled as he stumbled around the deck in the dark. He woke up at least once every night and to check the dock-lines – more often when the weather was wild – and he held onto stanchions and lifelines as he made his way forward, stubbing a toe once on a cleat and trying not to curse.

“You up already?” he heard Ted say, and as his eyes adapted to the dark he spied his son sitting on the bow pulpit.

“Every morning at two, come rain or shine.”

“You know…that’s not normal.”

“It is…if you have to be in the cockpit by four.”

“Maybe that’s why Mom always slept ‘til noon. Or…maybe it was the bourbon.”

“It wasn’t easy for her, you know.”

“She knew what she was signing up for, Pops. You were her meal ticket, her free ride.”

“She’s your mother, Ted, and I’m not sure she deserves that.”

“You always went too easy on her.”

“Easy?”

“The booze. The fucking around.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Jeez, Dad…she’d been cheating on you since I was in middle school.”

“And your point is?”

“My point? Well, when you were gone she was either stone drunk and passed out by the time I got home from school, or…”

“Ya know, Ted, it’s water under the bridge. I don’t want to hear it and you don’t need to live there. It’s over, and it seems to me a little forgiveness is in order – eh, Padre?”

He stood in the silence that followed, looking down at the stars reflecting off the water, searching for Altair.

“What about you, Pops? Did you fuck around?”

“Not once.”

“Figures. You’re the most saintly soul I’ve ever known. Too bad you’re an atheist.”

“I am not an atheist.”

“Oh, come on, Pops. The only time you’ve been in church was for a wedding or a funeral…”

“What does church have to do with God?”

They laughed at that one, one of his favorite lines, but he knew in his heart he might be wrong about all that stuff.

“I spend a lot of time in church now,” Ted added. “With the Fathers.”

“That sense of community is a powerful thing, son.”

“I know.”

“Is that what attracts you to the idea?”

“Maybe a little, but it’s the idea that there’s some purpose to all this, that maybe things happen for reasons we can never really fully understand.”

“My father was the same way. Said the only religious experience he’d ever had in his life was when he climbed a mountain over in Switzerland.”

“Sound like hypoxia to me.”

“Smart-ass.”

“Yup, and I have the SAT scores to prove it, too.”

“You got your brains from my dad, and your mother. Man, she was a real rocket scientist.”

“Until Jack Daniels came calling, anyway.”

“I guess we all have our crosses to bear.”

“You know what her’s is?”

“No, not really. A hunch, but she would never open up about it.”

“What’s your hunch?”

He sighed, shook his head. “You know what? Maybe you should ask her someday.”

“You’re just not going to speak ill of her, are you?”

“Nope.”

“You still love her?”

“Yup.”

“Jesus, Dad. Why…?”

“Why? Oh, I guess it has something to do with standing before God and making a promise to that effect.”

“But she…”

“There are no buts, kiddo. A promise is a promise, even if the other person can’t keep up their end of the bargain. You’re only as good as your word, and don’t you ever forget that.”

“I don’t imagine you’ll let me.”

“I won’t always be around, Ted. That’s something you’d do well to remember, too.”

“Oh?”

“You and your mother need to clear the air, come to terms.”

“Is she sick?”

“Not that I know of, but…”

“I’m not ready for that, Dad.”

“Okay…”

They heard it then…a disturbance in the water…a rippling in the air, and they turned and looked down into the inky starscape, saw a sea otter swimming on it’s back, looking up at them as it circled lazily under the bow pulpit.

“I’ll be…” he said.

“I thought these guys were extinct,” Ted whispered.

“Not quite. I see ‘em every now and then, even in the lake.”

“Damn…he seems almost tame.”

“Not likely. More like brazen confidence. They don’t fear us anymore, I guess.”

“Did they hunt them for their pelts?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Damn.”

“Yup. They’re kinda cute, ya know?”

“Kind of? I don’t know about you, but I’d like one as a pet.”

“Yeah? Well, aside from being aquatic mammals, they’re also wild. I don’t think that’s a such a good combination, even for a dorm room, but go ahead – ask her.”

“Her?”

“Hey, Paco, she’s laying on her back…see any relevant hardware?”

“When did you start calling me Paco? I was still a spud, right?”

“Oh, when we went down to Mazatlán that Christmas. You were, let’s see, four? You couldn’t eat too many tacos, and, well, Paco rhymes with…”

“Gee, that sounds original, Dad.”

He looked up into the night sky, found Altair in an instant and felt suddenly reassured that it was still there, and that struck him as odd. Had his life changed so much, been so thoroughly disrupted that now he felt unsure of even the stars? Then images of Ted eating tacos in a Mexican village filled his mind’s eye…

“You had to be there, I guess, as a parent. You stuffed those things in so fast…your cheeks were so puffed-out…you were a sight. You had your first beer then, too.”

“I – what?”

“Well, you don’t drink the water down there…”

“I remember…the Aztec two-step…”

“And then you bit into a huge jalapeño. Your face turned beet red and you started to tear up, and I had a bottle of Carta Blanca in hand. You reached up and grabbed it, downed about three-quarters of that bottle in one go…”

“And I’ve been madly in love with beer ever since.”

“I guess you thought it saved your life.”

“It probably did, ya know? Hallelujah, and praise the Lord!”

“Milk does a better job, so does Coke.”

“Thank God you drank beer those days.”

“Well, too late. There she goes,” he said as the otter rolled over and disappeared beneath the still waters.

“Damn. And I was really hoping…”

“So, you wanna get moving?”

“Now? It’s still kinda dark out, Pops.”

“Track’s laid in on the GPS…no problemo.”

“Well, sure; I’m still on east-coast time, so I’m up for the day.”

“Okay…I’ll fire up the diesel. You better go below and stow your gear…”

“I know the drill, Dad.”

Ten minutes later they were motoring out of the little harbor, north towards Little Flattop Island – and Canadian waters – and still there was no sign the sun was ready to put in an appearance. He sat behind the wheel, looking at chart symbology as Altair motored through the various channels between all the big and little islands that formed the way north, and then he heard Ted down below fixing coffee and warming croissants.

“You still do the Nutella and orange marmalade thing?” his boy, his “Paco,” called out over the rumbling diesel, and he shot a thumbs-up back at him. A few minutes later they were eating in the rumbling silence, the only sound the diesel working down below, but soon enough an apricot-salmon sky appeared over the mountains to the east, and he wondered what the day would bring.

“So, we putting into Vancouver tonight?” Ted asked.

“Yeah. Nanaimo is still kind of dead.”

“Suits me. Is Nancy’s still around?”

“Yeah, think so. Some traditions are still too strong for time to kill.” Nancy’s was THE place to meet and eat on the Sound, literally. It wasn’t called Desolation Sound without reason, but it helped the food was truly good. “You wanna steer for a while? Time to drain the main vein…”

“What? No autopilot? No flight director with auto-land capability?”

He shook his head while he flipped on the autopilot, then walked to the aft rail and pulled down his shorts just enough to fire a stream into their wake, his knees braced against the rail as he looked up at the fading stars. Altair was gone now, disappeared beneath the southern horizon, and he felt that old familiar tinge of sadness – when he heard Ted walking aft, by his side, and soon draining his vein into the sea, too.

He took the cut between Deer Harbor and Jones Island, adjusting his course on the chart-plotter and executing the change, then he cycled the radar, saw there was still no traffic on the water…but then he saw Sucia Island ahead, and Echo Bay. Probably the worst weekend of their lives lived in those returns…

“Echo Bay?” Ted asked, pointing at the screen.

“Yup.” And he saw his boy shrink from the memory. Barbara, drinking more than usual that weekend, decided it was time to shred her son to pieces, and with her razor sharp tongue had belittled and berated him while he’d been out on the water in one of their kayaks. He’d looked on as Ted dove off the bow and swam ashore, so paddled in to see what had happened.

Ted was sitting on the rocky beach, knees pulled up to his chest, tears falling from reddened eyes – trembling like a leaf – again.

They’d sat and talked until the sun went down, then he’d gone back to get another kayak to bring back to the beach – and he noticed Barbara wasn’t in the cockpit. When they both got back to the boat she still wasn’t there so he’d gone below – only to find Barbara passed out, only this time with an empty bottle of Valium in hand.

She’d been carried out by the Coast Guard that night, airlifted to Bellingham. Stomach pumped, three long days and nights in the hospital there, then back home. Ted a total wreck by that point too, but nothing compared to Barbara…

And here it was again. All those feelings tied to this place.

“I know it still hurts,” he said, “and I guess it always will…”

“I don’t know why you think I should forgive her.”

“Because of human frailty, son. Nobody’s perfect…”

“That’s a laugh, Pops. She’s the meanest human being that ever lived.”

“She wasn’t always that way, Ted.”

“Oh? What changed her?”

“Lots of things, I think, but first among them was, well, me.”

“You?”

“Yeah. When we started to drift apart maybe I could’ve…”

“Dad…stop. You can’t take the blame for who she is, all the things she did. She’s a crazy narcissist, maybe she’s even a goddamn psychopath, but all you did was fall for her, once upon a time, but you don’t have to carry that around for the rest of your life. YOU need to move on, YOU need to find someone else – while you’re still young enough.”

“You think so, huh?”

“Fuck yeah, you old goat.”

“So…you wanna get laid this summer?”

“What?”

“You said you wanted to try the whole girl thing this summer. What’d you have in mind? Falling in love, the whole nine yards, or just getting your rocks off?”

“I’d like to, well, both, maybe.”

“Has this got something to do with the whole priesthood thing?”

“Yes.”

“So, you’re really serious about this seminary thing?”

“Yes.”

“But…what if you meet some girl this summer, and you fall in love? Then what?”

“Then that whole thing wasn’t for me.”

“Okay. Then what?”

“I don’t know, Dad. Maybe…like…take one thing at a time?”

“Maybe, but if being a priest is what you really want to do, well, maybe you should just turn away from these things. It might just fill you with all kinds of regret later down the road.”

“Father Murphy talked to me about that, ya know?”

“Oh, how is the old goat?”

“Fine. He sends his regards, by the way.”

“Hard to believe we both had him as a prof.”

“Yeah…those Jesuits…they seem to hang on the longest. He turned eighty last year.”

“And still looks like he’s fifty, I bet.”

“Forty.”

“All that clean living.”

“Yeah, right. Those guys love their vino, that much I’ll say.”

“So…a girlfriend. You want to try a one night stand first? Vancouver is probably a target-rich environment.”

“Isn’t that line out of Top Gun?”

“Top Gun was right out of real life, Paco. Art imitates life, remember?”

“You mean, you guys really talked that way…?”

“Sorry. Yes.”

“Sorry? Why are you always apologizing?”

“I don’t know…kinda feels like the thing to do. So. Vancouver? We goin’ on a pussy-hunt?”

“Jeez, Dad, you sound like Trump…”

“You mean, I take it, that Trump sounds like ninety percent of every other white-Anglo-Saxon-male in this country? Man, what a double standard that guy has to live up to… Ya know, I heard that W was at a birthday party down in Texas, like before he was governor, and he was drunk as hell and walked up to the honoree, a woman who had just turned fifty. He asked: “Gee, does it feel the same to fuck after fifty as it did before?”

“Yeah, I heard that one. Did you know he was arrested in Maine, for driving while intoxicated…?”

“Yup, and did you hear he assaulted the trooper who arrested him?”

“Yup. Kinda makes me think there’s a double standard at play here, don’t you think?” Ted asked.

“Oh? How so?”

“Well, Clinton gets a BJ in the oval office and gets impeached, while W skated on all that stuff.”

“W had smarter people around him. Politics is the art of not getting caught.”

“Man, have we sunk so low?”

“We? What do you mean? There’ve been politicians for thousands of years, of one stripe or another. All this crap is nothing new, and all of which seems like a good way of you avoiding the question. Do you want to get laid tonight?”

“So, just like that…you can get me laid tonight?”

“No. That’s up to you.”

“Jeez, Dad…”

“Hey, Paco, you need to remember this: girls like sex too. Got it? You act like a Neanderthal and you’ll never get anything, but take it easy, be yourself and then let nature take its course.”

“I’m scared around girls.”

“Yeah? That’s been programmed into you by millions of years of evolution. You SHOULD be scared of ‘em, Paco, because once they sink their fangs into you, you’re doomed.”

Ted laughed, a nervous laughter full of expectation and insecurity, then: “Is that what Mom did to you?”

“Exactly. Didn’t I ever show you the bite marks?”

“Ha-ha.”

“I’d say the trick, given the biology of the situation, Ted, is to not fall in love. At your age you’re programmed to fall in love, it’s a biologic imperative. The drive impairs your thinking, too, makes you say silly shit and do even sillier shit. Like marry a gal you hardly know, promise to spend your life with her…”

“You mean, it all comes down to testosterone?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“And that’s what happened to you?”

“I don’t think I’m any different than any other red-blooded male out there, Paco. I say stupid shit under the influence of either testosterone or tequila. Or, as the case may be, both testosterone and tequila. You mother got me at a Cinco de Mayo thing over by the commons.”

“She…got you?”

“Got a couple shots of tequila into me, showed me some thigh. I was a goner after that.”

“You make it sound so simple…”

“Falling in love IS simple, Ted. You just gotta let it happen. You’ll know when it does, too. Take my word for it.”

“And, if I went for the priesthood…?”

“That’s a calling, Ted. In the purest sense of the word, and you’ve always been interested in this stuff so I’m not all that surprised.”

“You’re not? It sure surprised me…”

He looked at the chart-plotter again, noted they were abeam the island now and he checked the depth under the keel, then watched as the autopilot changed course to 315 degrees – about thirty miles to the next course change – and already he could see jets angling in for their approach to Vancouver International. How many times had he shot the same approach, he wondered? How different everything looked from up there.

“Want a DDP?” Ted asked, and he nodded.

He swept the horizon while his boy was below, and he saw a Coast Guard cutter on radar – then visually just as Ted came up from below.

“I think we’re going to have company,” he said, pointing at the display, then at the white hull arcing through a turn in their direction.

“Coasties?”

“Yup.”

“You got any dead bodies stowed below?”

“Two or three, why?”

“Just wonderin’?”

They watched in silence as the cutter drew near, near enough to see half a dozen-or-so men looking at them through binoculars from the bridge.

“I thought you have one of those stickers?”

“Yeah, still do, but that just allows me to clear-in without having to go to the Customs Dock in Seattle.”

“What are they looking for?”

“Drugs. Terrorists. Horny college students. You know…the usual.”

One of the men on the bridge-deck waved at them and the cutter changed course towards Bellingham, and he waved back. “Well, we’re in Canadian waters now, or will be in a few minutes. Guess it wasn’t worth the hassle.”

“When will we get to Vancouver?”

“Oh, about ten hours,” he said as he popped the top to the Dr Pepper. “I think the wind will pick up in about two hours, so if you want anything hot to eat, now’s the time to do it.”

“You got bacon and eggs down there?”

“Yup.”

“Stove still work the same way?”

“Yup, it does.”

“How many eggs? Still do three, over easy?”

“I do.”

“Okay, comin’ right up, Master.”

After ‘growing up’ together with Altair, there’s was an easy routine. Ted knew where everything was, how everything worked, even how to break a few non-essential items, too, but he knew his way around the boat almost as well as his father did. And soon enough, the smells coming out of the galley hit all the right buttons and he began to feel hungry – as they skirted along the Saturna Islands.

He watched the water closely as the sun poked up beyond Mt Baker, and he thought he could see Garibaldi’s crown beyond Vancouver as the first puffs of breeze filled in. They’d be able to make sail within an hour or so, he thought. Then he wondered where he could take his son to get laid in Vancouver.

And how long had it been, he wondered, since he’d had any?

+++++

They tied-up at the Coal Harbour Marina an hour before the sun slipped under the horizon, and after he showered he walked up to the Harbor Master’s office and talked to a few guys there while he waited for Ted. The locals recommended a few places overlooking the marina and once Ted arrived – off they went.

Loud music and watered down drinks seemed to be the order of the day, and though there were a few womenfolk around nothing seemed to call out to either of them so they left after a few minutes. They walked to another place that happened to have a deck overlooking Altair, and they took a table on the deck overlooking the marina – about fifty feet from the boat – and a waitress came to take their drink order.

“Dark rum collins for me,” he said. “Ted? Name your poison.”

“The same,” Ted said – cooly.

“I’ll need to see some ID, sir,” the waitress said.

“He’s my son.”

“Doesn’t matter, sir.”

“How about a ginger ale,” Ted sighed. “Maybe with the cherry on the side?”

The girl grinned. “What do you want?”

“A beer. I’d kill for a cold beer.”

“Been out on the water,” she asked.

“Two days,” Ted said. “Coming up from Seattle.”

“Oh? Where are you headed?”

“Desolation Sound,” Ted added. “Been there?”

She smiled then walked off to grab their drinks.

“She’s kinda cute,” he said.

“Kinda?” Ted added. “Man, she’s hot.”

“Sounds like an Aussie accent.”

“Is that what it is?”

She came back a minute later with his drinks, a ginger ale and an ice-cold Moosehead. She put the beer down away from Ted and put the soda down in front of him.

“You from Australia?” Ted asked.

“Melbourne. Been there?”

“Not yet. You been there, Dad?”

“Yup. Once or twice.”

“My dad’s a pilot,” Ted sighed. “He’s been everywhere.”

The girl turned on him then, curious. “Yeah? You fly for an airline?”

“Delta,” he said.

“You fly to Australia?”

“I’ve been down there. Sydney once, Melbourne a few times, but not on duty. When we had a run to Hawaii from Seattle, I did that for a while. These days it’s mainly LA and San Francisco, sometimes Salt Lake or Cincinnati. What are you doing here?”

“Spending the summer here, then headed to McGill.”

“I’m at Boston College,” Ted added.

“Oh? What year?”

“I’ll graduate next spring.”

“What are you studying?”

“Pre-med, philosophy.”

“Really? Me too.”

He smiled when he saw Ted’s reaction. “So,” he added, “you didn’t answer. Been to Desolation Sound?”

“No, I haven’t, but then again I’ve only been here a few weeks.”

“Done much sailing?” Ted asked.

“No,” the girl said, then she just walked off.

“Too fast, kiddo. Ignore her when she comes around next time.”

“Right. We gonna have dinner?”

“You want to stay put, or move on?”

“Stay. There’s something about her, Dad.”

“Yes, there is. Interesting type, that one.”

“For me, Dad. Not you…”

And he had to laugh at that. “Don’t worry, Paco. I’m not looking.”

“You could’ve fooled me.”

“Just trying to back your hand.”

“Okay…well, the menu looks good.”

When she came back to take their order Ted didn’t even look up at her.

“Maybe you could find some sort of middle ground,” he said.

“What?” Ted said, confused. “You said to ignore her.”

“Give her a smile next time. Make eye contact.”

“Jeez, Dad. Maybe you should be a priest…?”

“You’re right, Paco. Just be yourself…”

“Right. Nervous and unsure of myself. That’s a winning combination, every time.”

“Probably better than ignoring her.”

“Now he tells me…”

She came back with their salads a few minutes later.

“So, what’s in Desolation Sound?” she asked.

“Killer whales, sea otters – and Nancy’s.”

“Nancy’s?”

“Bakery. Best cinnamon rolls in creation.”

“Ah.”

“You wanna come with us?” Ted asked – with a straight face.

“What?”

“Would you like to come with us?”

“For how long?”

“How long you got?”

“Let me see,” the girl said before she disappeared back into the restaurant.

“Jeez, Paco…!”

“Hey, you said to just be me.”

“You are direct, I will say that.”

“You think she’ll come?”

“Depends.”

“On?”

“Well, she just got here, but she’s cute as hell so the manager is probably hitting on her. She’s away from home for the first time, maybe trying to earn a few buck before school starts but just figuring out that with the cost of living here she’s barely going to be treading water. Then there are the visa problems…”

“Jeez, Dad. What are you – like some kind of clairvoyant?”

“Nope, but I have been around the block a few times.”

“So, what do you think?”

“Don’t be too surprised if she says yes.”

“Really?”

She was different the next time she came out, when she dropped off their dinners. Not so distant, her smile full of curiosity, her eyes ready for the next adventure.

“She’s coming,” he said. “Mark my words.”

“You think so?”

“Yup.”

The next time she came by Ted pointed out the blue-hulled boat across the way: “See that one? Altair on the stern?”

“The stern?”

“On her bum?” Ted added, helpfully.

“Oh. Yeah?”

“We’re here tonight, leaving in the morning around eight. If you feel like coming along, you know where we’ll be.”

He watched the girl looking at his boat, wondering what was going through her mind, wondering what sort of calculus a girl made at a time like this. Unknown versus an unknown-known, an adventure versus a slow-motion train wreck.

If what he supposed was indeed going on.

But then the girl nodded her head and moved off again.

“Well?” Ted asked.

And he shrugged, but maybe he smiled just a little, though he thought he already knew the score. “Just have to wait and see,” he added – knowingly.

“I knew it. She’s coming…”

And again, he only smiled, yet he wondered why he thought he knew the answer. Jaded, perhaps? Getting a little too cynical about things? Or…simply judging other people through the prism of his life with Barbara…?

“Ya know,” he sighed, “wouldn’t surprise me either way.”

“That’s kind of a…”

“A cop-out? Yeah, I guess it is.”

“What’s wrong, Pops?”

“I think I need a change of pace, Paco. A real change of pace. I’m getting close to sixty years old, you know? I can retire next year…in fact, I think they want to push some of us old-timers into early retirement. We’re getting expensive, and a lot of us still have pension obligations the company will owe us. All these new guys? Mainly 410Ks, matching contributions, that stuff…”

“How long could you fly, Dad?”

“Well, a few more years, like four, but I could matriculate over to the training academy, teach there, do check-rides…”

“What did you used to call those guys? The Silver Eagles?”

“Yup.”

“Could you do that?”

“I could, but I’d have to move to the east coast.”

“Yikes. You wouldn’t…?”

“I used to think so. Now, I’m not so sure…”

“Dad! Leave Seattle? You’ve lived here, what…twenty-two years?”

“Yup. Year you were born. It would be hard, have to give up the boat, that whole thing.”

Ted shook his head. “That’s not you, and you know it.”

“What do you think you’re gonna do, Paco. I mean, really…getting laid is one thing, but…”

“Dad, I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a priest…”

“What? That’s a big change…when did you start feeling this way?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s like the more science I take the more incongruent religion and science become. Two competing worldviews, I guess, but one feels more and more like a child’s fairytale to me.”

“You think medicine’s the answer?”

Ted nodded his head.

“Why now? Just exposure to new ideas?”

“Maybe. But sometimes,” his son added, pausing to take a deep breath, “it just feels like growing up.”

“Ah. So, religion is childish?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Oh? What did you say?”

“I’m not sure I want to spend my entire life cloaked in a mystery that, well, there’s nothing about religion grounded in fact, is there?”

He shook his head. “You can’t confuse fact and faith, son. You have faith, then that becomes bedrock; if you don’t, well, it’s easy to turn and walk away.”

“But it’s not always so easy, is it? I mean…”

“I know what you mean. That’s why I’ll never deny the existence of God, and why I can’t go to church. I have my doubts about the whole thing, but I don’t have the courage of my convictions so here I sit, still sitting on the fence, looking at life go by and wondering what all the commotion is about.”

“What about Mom?”

“I think, in a way, the question drove her to drink.”

“Seriously?”

He laughed a little, inside, at his son’s sincere expression. “I don’t know, Ted. Look at the Irish…they brought Christianity to the British Isles, and then they turned around and invented whiskey. Talk about cause and effect…”

“Is that true?”

“Hell, I don’t know. One of the Fathers told us that in a history class…but then again, he was Irish…”

Ted shook his head. “Why do you think she drinks, Dad?”

“Because she hurts, son. She drinks to make it all go away because she doesn’t have the courage of her own convictions.”

“What? How so?”

“Because she has no faith, either in God or in herself. She always turned to anyone who’d offer to ease her pain…”

“You mean, like, buy her a drink?”

He nodded, but, in his mind’s eye he remembered coming home early more than once and finding her and another man in the throes.

“What is it, Dad? What are you thinking?”

“About her.”

“About her, what?”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to go there, son.”

Ted shook his head too. “I know. I came home from school more than once…”

“Ted, please. Just stop. I don’t want…we neither one need to spend any more time there than we already have, do we?”

“No, sir. Question?”

“Fire away.”

“What do you think? Would I be a better priest than a physician?”

“Wow, now there’s a question.” He looked out at the night, looked up at the stars. “Maybe they’re not as far apart as you think?”

“Hmm? Why do you say that?”

“Well, they’re both grounded in a kind of rigorous curiosity, and at the same time they’re both concerned with helping people find answers about themselves, maybe even their truest natures.”

The boy nodded his head slowly, but for the first time he saw something odd in his son’s eyes. A man’s eyes. Thoughtful, yet full of understanding.

“Anyway, I doubt you’ll ever be able to turn away from the Church, not completely. Maybe you’ll just turn out like a lot of the rest of us…you’ll go once a week and leave those mysteries to someone else.”

“But, me?”

He shrugged. “What I think really doesn’t matter, does it? You know, in your heart, what the answer to that is, and you don’t need all my baggage cluttering up the floor…”

“Maybe, but I’d like to know what you think.”

“Well, of course, I’d like to see you find your way to happiness. I think medicine would…well, I think you’ve got the right temperament for medicine. You’ve always been a kind of scientist, even when you were in Sunday school. You’ve always asked the hard questions, the kind of questions your teachers couldn’t answer, not effectively, anyway. Their easy answers always seemed to…”

“They pissed me off. They still do.”

“Still?”

“The answers never change, Dad. Someone is senselessly killed and there’s only one answer. It’s all a part of God’s mysterious plan, or we can never really know why…”

“Which presupposes there’s a why out there.”

“Exactly. Which means an order, a purpose to all this, which is comforting…”

“So, what do you tell an old man when you find out he has something like pancreatic cancer? That he’s going to die? Do you tell him the facts, turn him loose to find comfort in senseless emptiness?”

“I’m not sure I believe in the whole heaven and hell thing anymore, Dad.”

“Then you just answered your question, Ted. Case closed. Do you want dessert?”

They laughed at that and were still giggling when the girl came by and asked if they wanted something sweet to finish off their meal. She looked puzzled when they started laughing again…

+++++

He slept late that morning, didn’t get up ‘til three-thirty. He showered and put on his running shoes, then went topsides and filled the water tanks before he went for his run. There was a huge, forested park across the little inlet and he stretched first, then took off, as always sure running was the most stupid form of exercise ever invented. After fifteen minutes he was sure running was the greatest thing ever, and after forty minutes he was wrapped in the familiar warmth of his runner’s high. He slowed as he returned to the little marina, then walked it out for a few minutes – looking at his watch only once as he took in a few more really deep breaths.

He saw her on the dock just then, sitting on a dock-box, a large duffel on the planks by her feet – and he smiled.

When he walked up she looked up, saw him and smiled.

“Sorry about the hour,” she said.

“You brought everything, I see. Burned all your bridges, did you?”

She nodded – but she turned away, too. “Yup, looks that way.”

“You sure about this?”

She looked him in the eye then. “Yes. You’re a good man. I can tell that much just by looking.”

“I see.”

She laughed at that, and he did too. “It’s your son I’m not so sure of…?”

“Ted? Oh, he’s harmless. Confused as hell, but harmless.”

“Confused?”

“No spoilers, young lady. Oh, by the way, my name is Jim. Yours?”

“Tracy. Tracy Singleton.”

“Well, Tracy, I hate to ask, but do you have your passport handy?”

That seemed to take her back a little…

“We may be boarded by the Coast Guard…in fact, odds are we will be more than once. They’ll check, and as it’s my boat it’s my responsibility.”

“So, you’re a pilot? I mean, really?” she said as she pulled out her passport and handed it to him, hardly taking her eyes off him as he looked over her passport.

He looked up at her then, sizing up her words as a record of her experience so far. “Yup. Really.”

“Can I see your pilot’s license, then?”

He laughed at that. “Sure. You wanna come up, or wait here?”

“I think I’ll wait here.”

He nodded then hopped aboard, went below for his wallet – and he found Ted stumbling out of the aft head, rubbing his eyes. “Oh. You’re up,” he groaned.

“So is Tracy.”

“Who?”

“Tracy. The gal you’re going to marry.”

“Jeez!”

“Better put some clothes on, Paco,” he added, on his way to get his wallet. He went back out a minute later, stepped down to the swim platform on the stern and handed his license over to the girl – who looked duly impressed.

“So, no-foolin’, eh? You’re not a pretender?”

“I take it you’ve seen your fair share?”

“That’s all there seems to be lurking about these days…if you know what I mean?”

As if the word ‘lurking’ wasn’t enough, there was the look in her eyes: distrustful, alert, lonely. Distant. The literal opposite of Barbara, in other words. Where Barbara had always been reaching out, this girl had turned inward at some point. Her good looks had probably invited too much-unwanted attention…

“I suppose it’s always been that way, Tracy. You ready to come on up, or having second thoughts?”

She handed her duffel over, then looked at his outstretched hand before she took it.

He saw it took an effort on her part, then he watched her looking at all the stuff that made Altair work.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You can just sit back and watch…”

“Could you teach me?”

“Teach you?”

“To sail.”

“Sure…but Ted’s a better teacher than I ever was…”

“I doubt that,” the girl said, looking him in the eye.

“Well, let me show you around down below.”

“Do I have my own room?”

“Yes. It’s small, but…”

“Oh, that okay.”

He led her down the companionway, showed her the galley and the head, then led her to the tiny cabin under the cockpit. “Well, here it is…”

“You weren’t kidding,” she sighed.

“It’s kind of a storeroom that happens to have a bunk,” Ted said, now standing behind his father. “If it bothers you, we could switch places.”

“No. I’ll be fine here,” the girl said.

Yes, he thought, you will be.

OutBound (WIP conclusion)

Posted on April 22, 2017 by adrianleverkuhnwrites

So, wrapping up the story this morning, this last fragment still not proofed so you’ll find lots more flubber to laugh at. I’ll wrap up Elemental Mysteries this week, and clean this up too, post a unified version later next week. Awful, sleepless night, pain meds not doing their job, mood dark. I wonder how that affects what I write…what I’ll change when the pain is gone…? What music I’ll listen to…?

outbound 4 im

OutBound Part IV

She was wearing the deepest blue, blue – like her eyes.

Shocking electric blue lingerie. And she was so beautiful sprawled out on the bed. My sweat mingling with hers.

“God, I’ve missed you,” she whispered.

“I can’t keep doing this, Terry,” I cried. I can’t keep leaving you, wanting you and not having you. It’s going to kill me, and I’m afraid it might kill you too.”

“What’s happened, Aaron?”

I told her about Niki and she smiled.

“So, you think she wants to trap you?”

“What else could it be?”

“Hormones. Hormonally induced insecurity. She wants to be loved right now, to be spoon fed love until that baby comes, but be careful; by then she won’t have any left to give you.”

“What should I do?”

“Give me your cock.”

And she worked me back to life – and I fell inside her again, like Lucifer falling through the clouds. Her physical perfection was all that I craved, her seared emotional landscape the only place left where life made any kind of sense. Her blue silk legs cradling my face, licking the sides of her feet while I arced into her, electric need spilling between us in endless electron flows, and when her trembling began again I turned to pure, solid spasm and yes, my seed drifted within her honey – again.

Her hands on my face, she is licking me. Her legs have wrapped around me and she is pulling me inward again. I am on my hands over her now, breathing hard, sweat falling again and all I feel is this liquid warmth between us. My spreading seed, her encasing flows all mingling now. Her hands coaxing me down, my lips to hers, all warm breath as tongues join, as I feel my skin so perfectly mated to hers. We fit. Together. Perfectly.

She is moving under me again, trembling anew. I feel it in her thighs, then inside her, and she has hands inside her womb milking me. Something inside grasping me, pulling me, forcing every drop of need from my body – into hers.

“I love you so,” she whispers.

I am shaking my head, now totally aware there is only one woman I’ll ever truly love, and she is here, under me, and I feel so ashamed. A deceiver. Only the one person I have deceived the most is me. My deceptions have led these other women on, inward into unjustified hope. Maybe I would burn in Hell if only I believed in such things, but for now I will burn inside Terry McKay – and let the rest of the world look away. The world can burn away without me now – just please, leave me inside Terry.

“I can’t spend another day without you by my side,” I said.

– And she looked away.

A telling look. The kind that makes you think about the handwriting on the wall.

“I’ve met someone, Aaron. I’m leaving soon, for England. I may not be back, as a matter of fact.”

“Really? What was this, then? My goodbye fuck?”

“No, I love you, but I wasn’t sure I could go on like this. So I, well, I started to look for options.”

“And you’ve found one?”

“I think so.”

“It’s what you want?”

“No, it isn’t. Not really.”

“But you’re going to anyway?”

“Yes, I think so. Because I think it’s what you need, too. Get me out of your system, put these dalliances out of reach, someplace where you can’t easily get to me. Take care of Jennie and Tracy – and Niki, too.”

“Maybe you weren’t listening just now. You know, the part where I can’t live without you?”

“You can. And you will.”

“So, marry me, Terry. Stay with me. Let’s finish this thing together. See where life takes us, you and me.”

She shook her head, smiled at me. “I’ve got to let you grow up now, Aaron. Let you live up to the burden of your responsibilities. These are your children, Aaron, not mine, and not ours. You’re going to have to face that. That you are a father. That people depend on you.”

“And then what? I die inside – I die every day we’re apart?”

“You raise your kids. You give them all the love I know you can. You teach them music, you teach them to paint. You love Jennie, maybe not like you’ve loved me, but you love her. You be a mensch, not a nobody.”

“I can’t believe this is happening.”

“Aaron? If you need me, as a friend, I’ll be there.”

I shook my head, looked at her like she’d just knifed me in the gut, then I stood, held out my hand and helped her up. We held hands as we walked to the shower, and I bathed her, now trying to program the feel of her through our wet skin. While she dressed I noticed all her clothes are gone from her closet, and I know she’ll be leaving soon. While I’m drying off I hear the phone and go to take the call, and it’s Shelly.

“So, you’re in?”

“I am.”

“Meeting at MCA, ten in the morning. Iron out the contract. I think I got you good terms.”

“How’d you make out from the concert?”

“Amazing.”

“So, I made some money too?”

“You didn’t get me statement?”

“Nope.”

“I’ll bring it along with me tomorrow, but you did well, Aaron. Pops would be proud.”

“So, where’s Niki?”

“At the Beverly Hills. Registered as Rooster Cogburn, if you want to call her.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah. Original, isn’t it?”

“Right. Well, I’ll see you in the morning.”

When I turned around Terry was nowhere to be seen. Her car was gone, too, and the only thing she’d left was her lingerie and heels. I went to the kitchen and got a Baggie and put her things in the bag and sealed it shut, then walked around the house looking at her life – and Pop’s – spread out among all the little things in the house. The place was, I saw, more a museum now that any kind of home, and I walked down to the studio, now wide awake despite the hour. I looked around the studio and my keyboards, then the phone rang and I walked over and picked it up.

“You’re going to be okay,” Terry said.

“Am I?”

“The spare key to the car is on the kitchen table; it’s parked in the garage opposite International Departures, building 7, third floor, space C79. Do you have something to write with?”

“Yup.”

She read out a phone number, where she’d be in London, and I committed the number to memory. “If that changes, I’ll leave word with Shelly.”

“Okay.”

“Aaron? Don’t ever think I did this because I’ve fallen out of love with you. I haven’t. I can’t. But we can’t go on like this, can we?”

“Marry me, Terry. Stay with me.”

“Call me in a few months. Do the right thing, Aaron. Not for me, but for all of us.”

Then the line went dead and I sighed, looked at the numbers on the paper like they were a lifeline, and I sat down and looked around my studio again.

I’d be bringing this room back to life tomorrow, but could I – without Terry? Without her behind me?

What could I do without her?

I sat in the near dark thinking about what she really meant to me, and I knew she was right. Life would go in. I would write music without her. Good music. Maybe not great, but we’d see.

Then the phone rang again and I snatched it up: “Hello?”

“It’s me. Niki. Are you still up?”

“I slept on the plane.”

“Could I come over?”

“Sure. Door’s open, I’m downstairs.”

“Is it close enough? Could I walk?”

“You could, but it’s not something I’d recommend at three in the morning, not it LA.”

“Don’t you have a car there?”

“No. Terry left it at the airport – I’ve got to run out and get it.”

“What?”

“Terry left.”

“For good?”

“Sounds that way.”

“I’ll be right there,” she said, hanging up the phone.

And sure enough, I heard the front door shut about ten minutes later, then heard her coming down the stairs and into the studio. I was still sitting, inert, in the darkness. Still think about life after Terry – and she came right to me and sat, took me in her arms and cradled me.

I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I felt too burned up inside for tears, for much of anything, but Niki got that…

“How’s the baby?” I asked after a bit.

“Good.”

“You been writing any songs?”

“I tried, but I’m not sure I know how, really. I think I’ll rely on you this time out. Maybe teach me the basics, how you go about it.”

“Got any lyrics yet?”

“Yeah. Ten songs I think are okay. A few that aren’t.”

“Oh? We’ll look at those first. Got ‘em with you?”

“I brought everything with me.”

“Yeah?”

“I wanted…could I move in with you?”

I thought for a minute, then nodded my head. “Yeah, sure.”

Terry was right. Niki was insecure. She needed love. And in the end, I was sure there’d be nothing left for me – but what the fuck, ya know? What the fuck. I couldn’t do this alone.

+++++

I tried to pretend Niki was Terry, that Niki could be my muse, but the energy was different. Not wrong, but different. Niki was a hot, wet towel draped over my face, suffocating, maybe, after the initial surge of comfort. Her lyrics were inconsequential, too, mid-western white bread. Empty love songs, all longing without purpose.

She liked country music, the real old southern country stuff, and she liked rock, but she was trying to blend the two without any idea of the structure she wanted. Creating something new out of the two forms was going to be tricky at best, because country music wasn’t structured like rock, not in those days. Also, there was a fairly generous antipathy between Southern Country and the rest of the music world. Yet that’s where she wanted to go, into shallow, uncharted waters.

So it would have to be soft-rock infused country music, a commercialized amalgam of styles I’d never tried before. I wasn’t even sure why she wanted me to help her with this, as there were others who could take her into these waters a lot better than I. Still, she like to curl on the bed, and she even got into the whole lingerie and heels thing too, which was odd. Like she wanted to be Terry McKay, but could never be. She wanted to be sexy, and she tried to be without realizing sexy is not something you can try to be. You either are or you are not, and she wasn’t.

And that was a problem, too. She wanted to project sex in her album, which meant photoshoots for the album art would have to project sex, but who the devil thought sex would appeal to the Southern Country audience?

Well, color me wrong.

MCA hired a photographer who normally shot wide open spaces for the likes of Penthouse, and with makeup artists in tow, they worked for two days getting just the right look. Kind of Nashville’s idea of a cowboy’s hooker from hell, with no pubes or nipples and just a little symbolism to placate the Baptist set, the image reflected what I thought would be the best song of the lot, a mushy ballad called Rocking Chair. The engineers thought my Mellotrons and Moogs sounded a little too insincere so I yanked those out and inserted a seventy piece orchestra into the mix, to the tune of about 20 grand at union scales, but it sounded nice. When the single of Rocking Chair was sent to country stations around LA for a tryout it shot to number one in two days.

Then Jennie called.

“You ever coming home?”

“Yeah. We should wrap it up inside a week.”

“How’s Terry?”

“She’s gone. Left for London, for good.”

A long pause followed, then: “How’s Niki?”

“She’s not Terry, so don’t worry.”

“She told Dad she’s pregnant. Any idea who the father is?”

“Nope. But nothing would surprise me. She’s gotten kinda popular out here.”

“What are you doing…for company?”

“Waiting to get back home.”

“Yeah? You? Playing it all faithful?”

“Am I that bad?”

She laughed. “Aaron, you’re a four-wheel drive cock. Always on the go.”

I laughed at that. “Wow. Now that’s an image.”

“I don’t know why I love you, but I do.”

“Yeah? Well, I love you, and I know why.”

“Oh, yeah? Why?”

“I’ll show you when I get home.”

“Promises, promises.”

“How’s Tracy?”

“Eating like a horse. Asking about you.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. She needs her daddy.”

“I need her, too. How’s the spud?”

“She’s kicking a lot. I think she wants to get out, go for a walk on the beach.”

“Maybe I should get a bigger house, one I could put a studio in, ya know?”

“If that means you stay here more, I’m all for it.”

“This stuff with Niki might take off. Her first single is going to be big.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“This is exciting…!”

“Unexpected, but I think we make an interesting team. Kind of like Electric Karma meets Hank Williams, Jr.”

She laughed again. “Oh, gawd…”

“Yeah, driving me nuts. Deni would kill me, but it’s a challenge, in a good way. Stepping outside my comfort zone…learning a lot.”

And I was. That was the funny thing about it. Even the western musicians who came over to the studio had something to teach, and they learned stuff from me, too. Because in the end we were musicians, just trying to tell the stories, ya know?

Once we wrapped up the sessions we sent the tapes over to Burbank and waited for the word, and Niki went seriously Terry on me, nasty lingerie and nasty talk, and that night the L-word started slipping into her conversation more and more. I guess it had to happen. The thing is, I was starting to have real feelings for her too. I was gentle with her that night, like I didn’t want to give the baby a rough ride, but I felt a tenderness towards her I hadn’t felt before, too. The way I held her face, kissed her. The way she took me in her mouth, the way she hungrily told me she wanted it all. The way she swallowed, then looked up at me.

The guys at MCA were effusive the next morning, and there was talk of a concert deal.

“Count me out, guys,” I said. “I’ve got kids to take care of.”

So yeah, a studio musician could take my place on the road, no big deal, but with Niki starting to show concerts weren’t what she needed to be setting out to do.

“Maybe after the baby,” she said, and the studio reluctantly agreed.

So, I picked up the house, called an interior decorator and when the gal came over I told her I wanted the house redone, completely – “Just leave my studio functionally alone,” then Niki and I packed up and left for Auckland.

Jennie knew, of course, by then. I don’t know how, maybe Niki told her, but no doubt she could see it in her sister’s eyes, too. Yet it didn’t seem to make a difference. I was back in the same bedroom with her and that was all that seemed to matter. I found a nice place on Mellons Bay and started work on a bigger studio, met with an architect to get the project going, met with a musician’s group and a few local politicians, outlined plans for a few new albums to see if I’d have community support, then I turned my attention to Troubadour.

She’d been neglected, and it showed, but the damage was cosmetic and easily fixed. I started taking Tracy out several times a week, getting her used to the motion, and Jennie asked if she could come and I was adamant: not until after the baby. Same with Niki, for that matter.

Michelle was born that autumn, well, it was spring down there, and with her mother’s reddish-blond curls she was gorgeous, a real green eyed lady. Granma Michelle came down to spend a month with us, and that turned into four months – but only because the weather was so damn nice. Uh-huh, right.

But Granma Michelle also picked up on the Niki vibe. She was lady enough to not ask about it, but I could see the awareness of us in her eyes. I was also the one behind her oldest daughter’s sudden stardom, her debut album shooting up the country charts and earning her daughter some serious money, so maybe she didn’t want to rock the boat, or maybe she just didn’t understand – whatever – she was polite to me, but that was all. And that was enough, for me. I couldn’t help who I was any more than I could stop Niki or Jennie from feeling about me the way they did, and everyone was copacetic about things so there wasn’t any point in rocking the boat, was there?

In the end, I was father to all their grandkids, but Tracy, and they considered Tracy their’s too.

Which brings us full circle, to Jenn. Poor Jenn.

Her father had what was reported as a massive heart a few days after Jenn was released from the psychiatric hospital in Laguna, and I think, from what I was able to gather from news reports, she finally broke him down and tore him apart. That was the official version, anyway. So yeah, then I got a call from Shelly later that night, and she told me that I needed to come up to LA on the double, and that it had something to do with Jenn.

“Should I bring Tracy?”

“Not this time,” Shelly said – cautiously.

“You mean, like I need to run to the airport right now?”

“Now would be good.”

She picked me up at the airport and we drove down to Newport Beach in near silence.

“What’s happened, Shelly?”

“Jenn, well, she shot her father.”

“She what?”

“Right in the main pump. He dropped to the ground, dead as a doornail. Her mother watched it go down, then ran out of the house. She’s in the ER, doped up and out of it, but she asked to see you. Won’t talk to the police until she talks to you first.”

“Fuck.”

“You got it.”

So I shut up the rest of the drive, tried to ignore the heavy traffic on the 405 – at two in the morning – and by the time we got to the hospital, and to the room where she was “under observation” – I was really in a funk.

She shot him? I kept saying over and over.

A detective was there, waiting, and he went in with us after I’d been searched for weapons and drugs. Jenn was wide-eyed, staring out the window at Newport Harbor, and she turned to me, slowly, when we came in.

Her hands were cuffed to the bed, her eyes bloodshot, an angry red.

“I wasn’t going to let him hurt me anymore,” she said. “Not again.”

I pulled a chair up to her bed, took her hand. “I know. Something had to give, didn’t it?”

“He kept talking about getting Tracy back. So he could love her the way he loved me. I couldn’t let him do it, Aaron.”

The detective leaned over. “The way he loved you? How was that, Miss?”

Jenn ignored the cop, just looked into my eyes. “Jenn, you’ve got to tell someone. No one will understand until you do. You’ve got to tell me, at least…”

“He wanted to fuck her like he used to fuck me.”

“When did he start doing that to you, Jenn?” I asked.

“Always. He did it as far back as I can remember…”

We talked about it some more, but really, what was the point. That was what she wanted me to know. Then I asked her one more question: “What do you want me to tell Tracy?”

“Don’t tell her about me. She’ll never remember, anyway, but don’t you ever tell her about me. I don’t want anyone to remember me like this…”

“Look, if you change your mind, want to see her…”

“No!” she screamed. “Go away – now! I don’t ever want to see you again…”

Newport Beach’s finest escorted me from the room, and I talked with the detective for a while, and besides learning he was an Electric Karma fan I told him all I knew, and about the custody hearing a few years back, and that was that. Shelly drove me back to Foothill Road, and after I got my bags out of the trunk I walked around to thank her, then walked up to the house.

Lights were on, music was playing gently in the background and I turned, looked at Shelly. She looked at me and smiled, then drove off.

The door was open so I walked in, followed the music to the bedroom, found Terry laying there in her latex catsuit, a minor bullwhip already in hand, ready for her next performance.

We did not come up for air for days.

We went to Gladstone’s for soup and shrimp when we finally emerged. She’d had enough of London, she told me. Enough of life without me. Without California, too. When Shelly called and told her about Jenn she called British Caledonian and was on her way. I didn’t ask any questions, just told her I was happy to have her back in my life. Because I was. I called Jennie, told her what had happened, and that I’d hang around here to finish up work on the house, be back in Auckland as soon as I could. But yeah, the work was done, the house looked cool and the bedroom serene, but we didn’t get out of the room much after that day. We lived in a state of pure fuck, pure, nonstop fuck, like two shipwrecked people just plucked from their deserted island and turned loose on a Sunday brunch buffet.

“Should I stay here?” she asked me at one point. “Or should I go to Moorea?”

“You’re Commonwealth. Come to Auckland.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

+++++

And so began the most exhilarating time of my life.

The next seven years were astonishing. Raising kids, and I do mean kids, as Jennie and I had Rebecca two years after Michelle, and after Niki gave birth to Deni – and yeah, I know, but it had to happen – I gave her Victoria. I took the girls sailing together all the time, the babies and their mothers, and when I wasn’t tied up with them Terry tied me up with her whips and chains. I was surrounded every waking moment by three women who loved me completely, and then I had five girls whom I doted on – completely. Niki and I produced three more albums in that span, each better received than the one before, and, near the end of that time Jennie decided she might try for her MD.

Then all sorts of things started turning sour.

The first? Warren, working at the clinic on Moorea, simply stood up from a chair and clutched his chest, said “Oh, my,” on his way to the floor – and he was gone. Just like that. Except he was with me and Tracy when that happened. I called Jennie, in Auckland, and she hopped on a flight to Papeete with Niki and the girls. Michelle was devastated, and even Terry was, too.

I was left to settle Warren’s affairs, and he declared he wanted a chapel built on the island, and he’d left funds to make it happen. No one was surprised how many lives he’d touched, or how many who came to the dedication of the chapel, but his ashes were interred there, as I mentioned earlier, and everyone was there for the service – even Terry, who Warren fantasized about ‘til the end.

A year later Jennie found a lump in her left breast, and lets just say treatments were not as effective in the early 80s as they are now. She fought it for a little over a year and everyone was with her at the end, but she wasn’t ready and she fought it. I didn’t know you could fight death like that, the way she did. She was scared, and angry, said it wasn’t her time, then she screamed and literally started to pass, then crawled back to life, only to get hysterical and start the struggle again. That lasted a day and it was horrifying to watch, but in the end it didn’t make any difference, and we carried her ashes to Moorea to rest with her father’s.

The girls, all of them, were as shattered as I by her passing, but what left me reeling was the thought that we never got to finish our trip together. On Troubadour. And yet the little boat was still sitting down there on the water, waiting for my return. Then I heard that Jenn had finally succeeded, in a psychiatric prison. I didn’t hear how she did it, only that she had finally succeeded, and I was left to reconcile the two of them, my two Jennifers. One doomed to a life of hell, the other doomed to a life too short. One who’d had too much life, too soon, and one who’d never get enough – linked to me through Tracy, now and forever.

And so it was Tracy who first went to sea with me, to finish Jennie’s voyage. We sailed up to Moorea, then to Hawaii, when she was nine years old, when she was already a good sailor. Michelle was next. She wanted to see Japan, the temples and castles around Kyoto, and we spent a year on Troubadour exploring the Sea of Japan. She dove with the Ama and we walked mountain trails alive with cherry blossoms, and we took hundreds of pictures of temples. When we got back to Auckland we started painting everything we remembered. Rebecca was next, and we sailed from Japan north to Alaska, then down the coast of North America, to Newport Beach, and Troubadour had a homecoming there. I re-powered her there, replaced her rigging and her sails, then Michelle rejoined us and we sailed her back along the track of our original voyage, from San Diego to Nuku Hiva, Papeete and Auckland.

I thought about selling Troubadour then, but Niki wanted her girls to experience life at sea, with me, so Deni and Victoria and I set sail for Australia when they were 14 and 12, then we pushed on to Cape Town, South Africa, before getting on the conveyor ride back to New Zealand. Niki wanted to take a trip with me, so we sailed up to Moorea and visited her father and Jennie in their garden. She flew home and I sailed south. It wasn’t long until Victoria left for college, and I, now in my mid-fifties, took Terry, now in her mid sixties, to London – and we finally did the deed, got married.

And she still cleaned my clock, her love still left me breathless and feeling more alive than was humanly possible. We left London and returned to LA, and we decided it was time to put the place in New Zealand on the market, and that was one of the last projects Shelly oversaw for me. She passed a year after the house sold, a year after Terry and I set sail from Auckland, two drifters headed out to see the world, outbound to see what we could see. My huckleberry friend.

We sailed from Auckland to Australia, she and I, then on to the Yemen. We transited the Suez, sailed to Greece, then Sardinia. She turned into a goddess in Porto, on Corsica, and we made it on the beach – for the first time in our lives without lingerie. We stopped in Gibraltar, spend a week getting some skin cancers cut out, then we crossed to the BVI and, eventually, two years later, we transited the Panama Canal and sailed on to Hawaii, technically completing a circumnavigation somewhere along the way.

Terry fell in Honolulu, hurt her hip so we flew home to LA and I let her recuperate for a year while I wrote my first serious classical work. I filed it away for posterity when it was done, for after I was gone. Maybe someone would play it someday, but that would be for the girls to decide, not me. I did write one more Electric Karma album, and I called it Troubadour. The last of the San Francisco clan came to the house and we worked on it for three months, then Niki came and filled in the vocals, with Deni helping – everything coming full circle on the master recording.

Troubadour fell into disuse again, languished in Hawaii for two years before I returned to her and worked her over one more time. When she was perfect again when we left, alone this time, for a last voyage to California.

As Jenn and her father once had, I arced north towards Alaska, then cut east for Vancouver and picked up the currents that pulled me home. I bypassed Seattle and made for the Golden Gate, spent a week walking Berkeley, found Deni’s purple paisley house had been painted an olive green that made it look vaguely like a military barracks, and I had a laugh at that little irony. I walked around, tried to find some of the places we haunted, but like the Fillmore everything was gone. Troubadour and I went outside again a few days later and we turned south, bound for Santa Barbara and, finally, Avalon.

Off the casino, in that shockingly blue water, it felt like a spring day fifty years gone. LA in the distance, still lost under a blanket of brown haze. Sparkling sunlight dancing on the water, a few dozen sailboats at anchor with a cool breeze blowing out from Long Beach. The hand on the outboard’s tiller is mine but I don’t recognize the skin on those fingers, but that’s about the only thing I can see that’s changed.

Even Troubadour looks unchanged. The same white hull, the same blue cove stripe, her varnish still gleaming. A few details have changed, to keep up with technology, perhaps, but she looks ready for the next fifty years. And who knows, maybe she is. Maybe she’s in that same petrified forest me and Pops were stuck in, right after he married Terry. I turned away from my feelings after that, turned away and looked outbound, away from all my yesterdays. I went out looking for a Terry of my own and found my way to Troubadour instead. Funny how life takes you places you never thought you’d go. Maybe love is the funniest thing there is, the places you go following love.

I heard the Grumman fly over the harbor and turned, watched it line up with the wind and land on the water just off the point, and it taxied into the harbor, pulled up next to the float off the town dock and helping hands tied it off. A moment later girls started pouring out of the old Goose, my girls, all five of them, and Niki too. I came at them through the anchorage and Tracy saw me first. They turned as one, like fish turning in unison, and they waved at me. The children of three women – and me. Sisters…what a thought. All so different – all the same. Mine. All bound together by our time in Troubadour, by the journeys we shared. By the Time we shared.

I have a new inflatable now, still too small for all these girls to cram into, so as I hopped up on the float, after we hugged each other to death, I turned the Zodiac over to Tracy and let her run three of her sisters out to Troubadour, then come back for the rest of us. She is the oldest and, as I’m sure you’ve already figured out, the steadiest of the girls. Starting her second year of medical school soon; she, of course, plans on going into psychiatry. She left Deni and Niki and I standing there in the morning sun, breathing in the new day, same as any other day out here…

“You know,” Niki said, “I’ve never been out here before. Funny how far away LA feels.”

“None of you have,” I said, “but this is where it all started. My love for sailing, my love for Tracy’s mother.” I turned, pointed at an old corner restaurant. “Right there, as a matter of fact, and more than fifty years ago. Time has been kind to this old place. Change never took root out here.”

“How’s Troubadour?” Deni asked. She was my secret favorite, of course. She was singing, learning to play the guitar now, after mastering the piano by the time she was five. Kind of like her old man, if you know what I mean.

“Kind of like me, Deni. Old, but serviceable.”

We smiled at one another; Niki looked at me and came over, slipped under my arm. Deni came too and we hugged until Tracy made her way back through the anchorage. We loaded up and road through the morning, lever looking back.

Coda

We sailed to Newport Beach, to where Troubadour was born, and I had her hauled – again. Her hull needed attention now, her gelcoat was tired and cracked, so she was due for a facelift – and maybe another engine, too. It was funny if only because one of the guys who helped build Troubadour was the owner of the yard now, and he remembered me, and Troubadour, and the day she was born. We got caught up on her travels and he kind of teared up when he realized what I was telling him. That his hands helped create something so strong and vital, and so important to all of us.

Then we made our way to the Beverly Hills Hotel, to two bungalows out back, and after they were settled in I walked over to the house. Terry was waiting for me, of course. Still the most beautiful woman in the world, she looks half my age now, most people mistake her for fifty. I never fail to get weak in the knees when I come into our room and see her laid out in her lingerie and heels, and today was no different.

I’m going to give Troubadour to the girls tonight, when we meet up for dinner. Shelly drew up the transfer a long time ago, one of the last things she did for me, and I think it only fitting now. They all live in Auckland, have been Kiwis all their lives, and they’ll have to get Troubadour home, somehow, to keep the journey alive, to keep me alive in them. To keep reaching, moving outbound, moving into the light, into the music of our lives. I know they’ll begin the journey in Avalon, but of course I wonder what they’ll find out there…beyond our common horizon?

And I see, in the dimness, that Terry is wearing black today, which means that goddamn bullwhip is lurking under the sheets somewhere. Oh…the things we do to keep our women happy…

OutBound (second fragment)

Posted on April 19, 2017 by adrianleverkuhnwrites

Sometimes writing is all there is…ignore all the rest and keep at it. Still just bare storytelling – no proofing or other editing.

OutBound 2

OutBound – Second Fragment

The first morning out, sitting on a windless sea maybe thirty miles north of San Diego, I sat and took inventory of my life. There was nothing else to do, you see. In my rush to leave I realized I’d not put a single book on board, and the only music I had on board, other that my little guitar, was a shortwave radio. I realized I’d have to stop in San Diego to fix these omissions, or turn around and return to Newport – something I really didn’t want to do.

When Troubadour and I cast our lines off the night before, when we motored past Lido Isle, then Harbor and Linda Islands, then, finally, Little Balboa Island, I couldn’t help but think of Jenn. Jenn, locked away in her madness. Jenn and her razor blades. And when I passed her father’s house I had seen him standing in his living room looking at me as I passed.

Did he know Troubadour was mine? Did he realize who was passing by his house? Did he understand his role in our little drama? In my little corner of the universe he was my Nixon, I a kind of McGovern by proxy. He hated me not least of all because I’d voted for McGovern, while he was a staunch Nixonian, and I liked to chide him about Watergate and all that told us about modern Republicans. He’d counter with endless jibes about Democrats being socialists, and worse, while I referred to Goldwater Republicans, like him, as fascist John Birchers. Which he was. When he told me once he thought the free speech protestors at Berkeley should have been rounded up and shot, and that Edwin Meese had privately agreed with him, I saw a smug pride in the man’s eyes that haunted me for years. He was a Nazi and didn’t even seem to care what that meant.

Jenn, of course, struggled with the dichotomy presented to her. She loved her father but the longer she remained in school, the longer she studied philosophy the more she understood what her father really was. And pretty soon he realized he was spending his money to turn his daughter against his own ideals, and I think that set up the final conflict between them. Rather that let her grow, I think he began to undermine her – at first in intellectual arguments, and then, when that didn’t work, through emotional attacks.

Jenn, I think, fell into that trap. And it was a trap. There was no way to win, for her, anyway, and the only way he could win was to destroy her. And he did, but you’d have to be sick to call that a victory – by any measure.

About halfway through that first night I realized I couldn’t break free of all this toxicity by myself. I needed other people around me in this endeavor, and I’d need to find those voices in books, in music. I’d need to be able to pull into a new anchorage and get ashore, find local music and listen, really listen to voices of anger and love, of resistance and submission. If this trip turned into a series of angry flights the time would be pointlessly spent. If, on the other hand, I tuned in and listened with my musician’s heart there was a chance I could learn something valuable, and quite possibly share what I learned with people who might listen.

The wind fell away and then the sea took a deep sigh and was still, leaving a black mirror alive with dancing starlight. We, Troubadour and I, drifted by a massive kelp bed and I saw a sea lion poke it’s head out of the tangled mass of starlight and stare at me as we drifted by. I wanted to dive in and play with it, to live in it’s world for a minute or two, understand what concerned him or her as it went about it’s business in the darkness. Find dinner, I reckoned, without becoming something bigger’s dinner. Elemental exigencies. Kill or be killed. That was life, wasn’t it? That’s what civilization had tried to tame. All our laws, all our frail moralities…those things kept nature away, and nature, true nature, has always been all about the most basic type of survival. Find food and keep from being killed in the process.

That seal was hiding in the kelp because something bigger than he was out there in the darkness, circling, waiting for the opportunity to sprint in and eat him. Just like me, I thought. Out here on Troubadour, running, hiding, trying to turn this into a noble mission to enlighten civilization while I ran from Jenn and her razor blades. While I tried to hide from images of Deni as she fluttered down to the dark embrace of death.

It’s funny, the things that run through your mind in the last minutes of darkness, just before the sun rises, a few miles offshore. You can see houses on bluffs above beaches, sleeping people just coming to the sun while you look at the processes of civilization from afar. When you cut the cord and sail away you begin to distance yourself from all those routines, from all those laws and moral constructs that define your existence ashore. But when you sail along the periphery you really feel that ‘apartness.’ You feel it in your bones, like you’ve set yourself adrift and the purpose may or may not be revealed to you.

And then I really realized this was my first time out on the water by myself.

And I didn’t like this being alone thing.

So I turned on the motor and advanced the throttle, made for the entrance channel to San Diego. By mid-morning I was tied up on Shelter Island; a half hour later I was eating eggs Benedict on a deck overlooking the water, so deep inside the gut of civilization it made me giddy. I walked to a yard after brunch and asked about radios, maybe one with a cassette deck? No problem, they told me. They could have it in by evening.

That, too, is civilization. Ask and ye shall receive. Just hand over the gold and run to the bookstore. We’ll take care of the details while you go spend some more money.

So…I went to all the bookstores I could in five hours, came back to Troubadour with piles of books and tapes, and I stowed them while workmen rounded out the radio installation, then I went back out for dinner, and I made my way down to an upscale steak place.

“So, what could I get you to drink?” the waitress asked.

“Something strong, something with rum.”

How about a Mai-Tai, she said. As long as it’s strong, says I. Not some watered down girly drink.

She looked at my shorts and boat shoes then.

“Coming, or going?” she asked.

“Pardon?”

“You just coming in from a trip, or about to head out?”

“A little of both,” I said, then I explained.

“Where’s your boat?”

“Right down there,” I pointed, and I could indeed just see Troubadour across the way, “the one with the blue hull.”

“Troubadour?” she asked. “I was looking at her earlier. She looks sweet.”

“Oh?”

“I’d love to just sail away someday.”

“And where would you go?”

She put her hands over her eyes and pointed in some random direction: “That way!” she said, grinning, and I laughed with her before she took off and brought my medicinal strength rum and some bread. After she took my order, she pointed me in the direction of a truly colossal salad bar and disappeared, but a minute later she dropped by again.

“So, where are you headed?” she asked.

“Nuku Hiva.”

“When you leavin’?”

“In the morning.”

“Want some company?”

“Have a passport?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you ought to drop by after you get off tonight.”

“Okay.”

Surreal? I know.

Stupid? Probably.

Random, almost to the point of silliness? Oh yeah.

Ah, but her name was Jennifer. Of course. It had to be.

Jennifer – of Appleton, Wisconsin. Jennifer – she of the bright smile and long legged Jennifers. Jennifer, who would in a matter of days become the love of my life, who would spend the next twenty one years glued to my side. There are chance encounters, random permutations of luck and timing, and then there was Jennifer. Jennifer ‘Do you have a passport’ Clemens. ‘Okay’ became a standing joke between us, the simplest word imaginable to set in motion an endless series of adventures. “There’s a volcano! Wanna race to the top?” – “Okay!”

If Jennifer of Newport was a morphine drip fed scowl, Jennifer of Appleton was a serene smile, an imperturbable, old world smile grounded in mid-western common sense. She was JFKs glass half full, she was two years in the Peace Corps after earning her RN. Best of all, she’d never heard of Electric Karma, and neither did she know who I was, or what I did – and it never mattered once she figured it out. She’d wanted to see the world, and in the beginning I was simply going her way. Her ticket to ride.

She’d been out on the bay a few times since she’d moved to San Diego the year before, ostensibly to get her master’s in nursing, but she’d fallen into a different vibe after she settled in with a group of nurses and decided to ‘go back to school.’ She didn’t know what she wanted to learn, only that learning was an imperative she couldn’t shake. She went to school days, worked tables at night, and spent weekends working at a free clinic – because that gave her the time and resources to do what she wanted. And what she wanted seemed to change from course to course – until what she really wanted was to break away and get out there.

And maybe there was something mercenary in our coming together. She’d planted her feet in a place and a time where sailors gathered before jumping off to the South Seas. Maybe her questions about where was I headed, and when was I leaving weren’t without purposes, or maybe now that she knew what she wanted she put herself in a position to get there. Maybe she would have been like an autumn leaf, blowing any way the wind blows – but she found her way to me.

Because I’d forgotten to pack a few books. Because I couldn’t play music on the boat.

Sometimes life turns on the silliest, most inconsequential things.

We put off leaving a day, only because that’s how long it took her to cut all the ties that bound her to life on shore, and when we slipped away that next morning I did so knowing this was almost a case of the blind leading the blind. I was not yet a deeply experienced sailor, and she was a neophyte, so we went slow. We sailed down to Ensenada, anchored out and rowed ashore, went to Hussong’s because that’s what everyone else did, then we made a longer trip south, to Guadelupe Island, about a third of the way down Baja, and after watching researchers diving with Great White we decided against swimming ashore.

We hemmed and hawed, debated whether we should go to Cabo San Lucas and top off the water tanks or just strike out, head for the Marquesas, and as I’d stowed dozens of bottles of water to go with what Troubadour carried in her tanks we opted for the latter. So, set a course of 210 degrees and stare ahead at 3000 miles of open water and what do you get?

I’d have, at one point, called it wedded bliss, but now I called it Jennifer Clemens.

+++++

We’d set the wind vane and let it steer for hours on end, and the most joyous times came with the dolphins who joined up from time to time. They came up from behind one morning and zinged alongside, playing in Troubadour’s bow wave and, as she has a tremendous bow-sprit Jennie lay up there, her hand outstretched, and every now and then one would spring up, let her take a touch on the fly, and those close encounters seemed to energize her. She’d come back to the cockpit with this look in her eye and I’d wrap myself within her arms and legs for a few hours. The second time that happened I looked up, saw we had an audience and I wondered what they thought of us. Were we really so different?

A great Atlantic storm entered the Caribbean, then crossed Panama and Nicaragua and made it’s way into the Pacific, and though it tracked north of us them remnants hit us, and hit us hard. It was my first real storm at sea, yet Troubadour was built, like the Westsail, to handle these conditions – and she did, with ease – and after the storm’s passage we both felt a surge of confidence.

The net result? We began to talk about ‘what comes next?’ Both for this voyage, and for us. I felt bonded to Jennie after that storm, like she was apart of me now. Like that otherworldly loneliness I’d felt off the coast of La Jolla was truly a thing of my past, and now Jennie was my future. And I told her that, in no uncertain terms.

“What do you want to do?” she asked.

“Spend my life with you.”

“You do?”

“I do.”

“Okay.”

“Does that mean what I hope it means?”

“Yes.”

So, right out there in the middle of nowhere, with only God standing as our lone, mute witness, we said what words we remembered and pledged to take care of one another ‘til death do us part. It was really that simple. Even if marriage is a civilizational construct, I felt real comfort over the years knowing she had my back, and that I had her’s, too. Yes, that’s odd, but yes, that’s being human. We weren’t meant to make this journey alone, yet the most staggering thing was how I knew she was the one within minutes of meeting her.

When she came down to Troubadour that night she was still in her uniform, a short little dress with black tights under, a white blouse with a red vest over, and while she looked the boat over I looked her over. We talked for a few hours about the road she’d taken to San Diego, and where she hoped it would lead next, and the more she talked the more comfortable I grew with her voice. She might have looked flakey on first glance but really, she was anything but. She was as grounded as anyone I’d ever known, yet grounded to the beat of a different drummer.

I fell asleep with my head in her lap, and she was still with me when I woke up six hours later. When I slipped up and fixed coffee she woke and looked at me.

“So, you really want to do this?” she asked.

“Yup. Can’t imagine doing it without you.”

Yes. Life really can be that simple. You just have to open your heart at let it in.

Three thousand miles at a hundred and forty miles a day is 21 days, and my celestial nav was spot on so we nailed it, sailed into Taioha’e and cleared customs, then anchored out in an unexpectedly easygoing euphoria.

“We did it,” I sighed.

She snuggled in and didn’t move for an hour, and then I heard her easy breathing, her gentle sleeping, and I settled in beside her for the duration.

+++++

I know this is marks a departure from the flow of things, but we walked ashore a day later and found a small Catholic church, Jennifer being an Episcopalian and all, and we asked the guy with the white collar to do the whole marriage thing for real. No paperwork, mind you, just say the words before God I think you’d have to say, and he did and for some reason we felt for real after that. She took my name, a nice German-Jewish name, and jettisoned her Wasp-British name and she called her folks back home – who had no idea she’d left San Diego, mind you – and told them the news.

Major freak out ensued, by the way, and her folks told us they’d like to come to Tahiti to meet me, and to let them know when. Then we took off to do some grocery shopping.

Yeah. Surreal.

Just like grocery shopping in the Marquesas was surreal.

No supermarkets, especially not in the early seventies, and very few tourists to get in your way. Want a new alternator belt for your Volvo Penta diesel engine? Say the words ‘fat chance’ three times as fast as you can. Then try backwards. Yup, it was about that easy. Fed Ex hadn’t quite figured out how to spell Marquesas back in 73-74, which meant an alternator belt would come by sea. Like maybe by copra schooner out of Papeete. I had a spare, of course, but what if that one cut loose? I needed a spare to replace my spare, and it looked like that would have to wait a few thousand miles, but I did find a mechanic savvy enough to locate the alignment issue causing the belt to wear prematurely. Problem solved, lesson learned and filed away on a 3×5 card – with notes and drawings attached.

Long distance sailing has been justly described as sailing to exotic ports and doing extensive maintenance, and after fifty years I can say I’ve pulled apart more engines in obscure places than I’d ever care to admit. I’ve replaced Troubadour’s original engine four times in fifty years, too. I maintain the things, do all the fluid changes at twice the most conservative intervals – like changing engine oil after every fifty hours of use – but I don’t run my engines often and the salt water environment simply kills them faster with little use. Yes, that’s correct. Marine engines are cooled with seawater, one way or another, even so-called fresh-water cooled engines, and salt kills metal, period. So, rule number one: shit don’t last and it’s got to be replaced. That’s why sailing is described as standing in a cold shower – ripping up hundred dollar bills just for the sheer fun of it. That’s the nuts and bolts, but here’s the grease: the more you can do yourself the more affordable sailing becomes. The corollary? When you pay someone else to do the work, about 90% of the time the work is poorly done – or just plain wrong, leading to more expensive repairs. When we made New Zealand a year or so later, I took a diesel mechanics course; it was the best six week I ever spent – in terms of saving money. I still have zero interest in engines, but I’ve always had tons of interest in saving money.

Anyway, Jennie was as good as her word. She wanted to explore. She wanted to meet people. And Jennie was an RN. A real, honest to Pete nurse. When word got out she was an RN someone from the local hospital came down and asked if she would mind working on Hiva Oa at a clinic for a month or so. She looked at me and I shrugged ‘why not’, and off we went. There wasn’t a doc at the clinic there, it turned out, and she was doing front line work under a docs supervision – by radio – and she loved it, had never been happier. One month turned to two, then three, then her replacement – from France – finally turned up and we were free again.

Rangiroa was out next stop, inside the northeast pass by the village of Tiputa, and we stood by and watched Jacques Cousteau and Calypso maneuver into the lagoon and drop anchor a few hours after we had – and about a hundred feet away – and Jennie wound up working on the boat for two weeks while Cousteau & Co dove on the reefs just outside the pass. One night we heard Electric Karma’s second album blaring over an onboard hi-fi and when the crew found out the next day who Jennie’s main squeeze was we had a blowout on the beach that night that was truly epic. We became good friends and ran into Calypso several times over the next decade or so, yet that experience came to define most of the people we ran across out there. After a few months we both realized we’d be running into these same people time and again – because we were all like minded explorers on the same path. We might not see John and Jane for a few months, but then there they’d be, in some out of the way anchorage no one had heard of before, and we’d exchange information and ideas, maybe some rum, too, then be on our separate ways.

During the three months we spent on Hiva Oa I got this Paul Gauguin thing going and started painting. Yeah, Gauguin spent most of his time in the Pacific on the island, and yeah, you could buy art supplies there. So I did. An old French gal taught me the basics and I started painting, and I’ve not stopped once since. When he dropped the hook someplace nice I’d start sketching everything interesting, and in time we began searching out anchorages simply because they had scenic appeal. By the time we hit Papeete I was running out of places to store canvases.

Because of the time Jennie had worked on Hiva Oa all sorts of bonds and fees were waived in Tahiti, and we were extended the offer to spend more time in Moorea, in the village of Papetō’ai, if she’d work for another month. Okay, look at pictures of Cook Inlet on Moorea, then factor that getting a permit to anchor there was next to impossible, then hit enter. Now, you’ve just been given a permit to anchor there as long as Jennie was working there, plus a month. Free, as in no charge. We ended up anchored by a waterfall – for six months. I shipped fifty canvases back to LA; when my lawyer saw them she asked if she could buy a couple. Then she told me she had shown them to a gallery owner. They wanted to represent me. Please send more, they said. Bigger is better.

I already thought life couldn’t possibly get any better than this – and now please paint more? A month later word came that thirty plus paintings had sold, and the next time I sent in a batch I’d better count on returning to LA for a dedicated showing.

Then the inevitable happened.

Jennie’s parents, and two of her three sisters, announced their coming to Tahiti to meet the latest member of the family. And the two sisters were huge Electric Karma fans.

Oh happy day.

So, I rented a house for them to sleep in, and figured we’d take them sailing on the days Jennie had off, and on the day of their arrival we got on a Twin Otter at Temae and hopped across the channel to Papeete.

Warren Clemens looked like he’d been called up by Central Casting to play the part of a midwestern preacher with an attitude problem. Problem is, looks can be deceiving. Warren was a hard drinking ex-Marine with a serious deranged sense of humor. He was also a physician, a skilled general surgeon who taught at the medical school in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He was also a Green Bay Packers fanatic. I mean a real fanatic, not some half-assed wannabe. And as soon as Warren learned his baby girl was working at the local clinic he had to go see what she was up to.

And yeah, you guessed this one already, didn’t you?

As soon as they leaned he was this hot shot surgeon some kid gets pulled off a reef after a white tip reef shark tried to eat his legs off, and the kid’s half dead by the time they get him to the clinic. No way he’ll make it to Papeete. If only we had a surgeon here?

And there goes mild-mannered Clark Kent into the phone booth, emerging seconds later in his red cape as Super Surgeon, to save the day. Yeah, he saved the kid’s life. Yeah, he did an appendectomy three days later. Then gall stones, then he repaired and set a compound fractured femur. Another appendectomy followed – and, mind you, he wasn’t getting paid for any of this – and he was having the time of his life. Long story short, for the next eight years Warren and his wife, the first mother I’d ever really known, came back to Moorea and he volunteered for two months at a stretch. He stopped coming – eight years later – only because he died; there’s a chapel in the forest overlooking Cook Inlet named after him. He’s buried there, and so is his wife, and my wife too, for that matter.

Mind you, all this happened because I forgot to pack some books on Troubadour. I mean, are you following along with the chorus here? It’s why my next solo album was called Serendipity, why a butterfly sneeze in Tibet comes across the Pacific as a typhoon. Everything is part of an endless chain of cause and effect, so trying to find the root cause for something is as pointless as asking what happened before the Big Bang. Who the devil knows? And who cares? It’s pointless and silly to ask the question, and Buddhists are on the right track when they say: accept what is. If you can’t handle that, go get an enema, flush your brain and get right with God. You ain’t gonna know, so chill out and paint another picture.

Warren’s two week trip stretched out to three, and he wept when he left.

Okay, enough about Warren. Let me introduce you to Michelle. My mother. Well, you know what I mean.

Michelle liked to play cards. She also taught physics. Quantum mechanics, to be more accurate. She was one of a handful of women to work at Oak Ridge – on the Manhattan Project. To say she was smart was like calling Einstein a bright kid. To say Jennie came from the deep end of the gene pool was scary. Scary because she was serving steaks at a waterfront restaurant in San Diego, waiting for me to come along. What if I’d gone to a bookstore in Westwood?

Michelle also liked to paint. Watercolors. Nothing but, and usually simple flowers. She taught me, and I was hooked. We spend hours walking off into the forests around the inlet and she’d find something new, sketch the rough outlines then pull out this monster Nikon F and start shooting away, getting just the colors she needed down on Kodachrome 25 for later reference.

Meet my new sisters, Niki and Taylor. Both into music. Both teaching music. Both in love with the idea of me, before they met me. Both went nuts after spending a few days with us on Troubadour. We spent evenings on the boat cooking and talking shop, then I’d pull out the old backpacker and start playing through the newest ideas, sounding my way through the classics and bridging the divide to rock, and they were all abuzz about Yes and ELP and Pink Floyd, and I hadn’t heard Dark Side of the Moon yet. Niki set me straight, and Us and Them became my new favorite when we found a cassette in Papeete a week later.

There are jagged spires around the island, some of the most inspiring peaks I’ve ever seen, yet many lack perspective unless seen from the sea, particularly along the west side of the island. We circumnavigated Moorea, slowly, over a two day period, and I should have bought Kodak stock before we set out: I don’t know how many rolls we blew through. Hundreds? Maybe. It was nonstop – blow through 36 exposures then dash below to rewind and reload – and as I’d never seen this before I was just as pathetic, just as consumed. My only regret? I shot Ektachrome as there was no place to get Kodachrome developed out here, and some of the slides were fading fast by the time Jennie passed.

Still, some of my most cherished memories were captured during those three weeks. As I’ve mentioned, I’d not had a mother and father, let alone sisters, and now by golly I did. I would have fallen in love with them, all of them, simply for that reason, but they turned out to be really fun, really interesting people, and all of a sudden life felt complete. To put is succinctly, I’d not felt this good since Electric Karma’s heyday – and no stage fright, too. A year away and life was evolving into the sleigh ride, not a care in the world and everything was just easy.

Of course, shit had to hit the fan. It just had to.

And it hit from an unexpected direction.

Terry. My ‘grandmother.’ She’d married and divorced an old English movie star and was now simply destitute. He’d bled her dry and walked away, walked into the arms of a younger, more economically productive actress, and Terry was about as low as a human being could get when she got word to me through my lawyer that she needed help. I bought her a ticket from New York City to Papeete and she arrived two days before the Clemens clan was due to leave. By the time she got to Troubadour I’d told them my grandmother was coming, but not who she was, so when Terry McKay showed up onboard Warren clammed up tight, Michelle tried to act nonchalant – but failed, and the girls gushed. All in all, it was exactly what Terry needed. She was entranced by Moorea and I made an offer on the house I’d rented, bought it outright and she moved it – with the understanding that we’d all consider the place kind of a home base going forward. When local officials heard they had a genuine Hollywood legend in their midst…well, let’s just say they were very supportive of the idea. Warren was still tongue-tied every time he was around her, though.

We said our byes at the local airport, and as I said, Warren was a basket case. The experience had been as draining as it was fulfilling, and I hugged Michelle and the girls in a way that said everything. I was happy. They were too.

Terry was beside herself, of course. She and destitute were not on good terms, and I talked to my lawyer who talked to some people at Universal who talked to – yada-yada-yada – and she had an audition if she could get to it. She said she couldn’t, she wasn’t strong enough.

Could she if I went with her?

“Yes.”

So off we went. We stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a first for me, because she had to ‘keep up appearances.’ The studio picked her up and went to visit my gallery, dropped off a few new canvases. Visited my friend at Pop’s house, then my lawyer, and by the time I got back to the hotel Terry was in the room, out of her mind with anxiety. She wouldn’t hear for a week or so, and if she prevailed her presumed co-star would be none other than her ex.

“Let’s leave tomorrow,” she cried.

“Let me make a few calls,” I replied.

She got the part and her ex was passed over, the part going to David Niven instead, and she was suddenly ecstatic and destitute no more. Shooting would begin in two months so we returned to Moorea, and as I had a real workspace to set up a studio I started painting. Huge canvases this time, like six by ten feet, and this series was all Moorea, all misty mountains and rain forests full of furiously blooming flowers. Terry and I started walking the forests, she started photographing flowers and soon got into it, then she too wanted to learn watercolors and when I passed word along to Michelle she was over the moon too. Next summer would be fun, I reckoned, assuming Warren did lose Michelle due to his obvious infatuation with Terry. I mean…Peyton Place, anyone?

Jennie was the one who picked up on Terry’s infatuation with me.

I’d never seen it before, obviously, but then again neither had Jenn. Jennie, on the other hand, was adroit at picking up these things. She read people and didn’t miss much, and she could spot a phony in two seconds. Terry was a phony. Insecure, not really talented but cute as hell. She was, in Jennie’s mind’s eye, a pretender. Terry’d made it this far on her looks alone, and her ability to enchant men, and that was why, Jennie guessed, the old Englishman had ditched her. He’d seen through the bullshit and moved on. Jennie doubted the guy had swindled her, too; more likely she’d try to buy the guy off, keep him interested by buying him things. Classic, she said. Now she’d turned her attention on me – because I was safe. Because I’d give her all the attention she needed. Because of Pops. She was taking advantage of me.

Yeah. Maybe. I wasn’t buying it quite yet, but I could see her point. Regardless, she’d been a part of my life for years, some of the most important years of my life, and I wasn’t going to turn my back on her. If I had justification to call her family, then where’s the line between taking advantage and doing one’s duty.

Funny thing, that. I’d never talked to Jennie about Jenn. Jenn and her razor blades, and for some reason I decided to that day. I ran down the whole sordid chronology, from the toxic relationship with her dad to the last attempt, and the abortion, in Vancouver.

She was appalled.

Mainly, I think, that we’d not talked about it before. That led to a talk about abortion. We both hated the idea of it, but we both supported the idea that it was ultimately a woman’s right to choose. No big deal so far, right? So why had I, in effect, ditched Jenn when she decided to have an abortion?

Because, I said, I considered that child ‘ours,’ not ‘hers’ – and by taking unilateral action to take that child from me she was declaring in the starkest possible terms I wasn’t part of her life.

“But she’s ill, Aaron. Couldn’t you see that?”

“But she was considered well enough to make that kind of decision? If she was well enough to consider the implications of ending a life, why wasn’t she considered well enough to take her own? I don’t get all these moral inconsistencies. They don’t make sense. How is it okay to kill a baby at four weeks but not at four months. I don’t get it…?”

“But still you think it’s okay if the mother wants to?”

“I think it’s wrong to butt into other people’s lives.”

“But it was okay to force her into having that baby, because it was yours, too? But you were not going to carry that baby, were you? Or care for that baby if you two split? Maybe she was never secure enough in the relationship to think you’d always be there? After you split up in Honolulu, went back to LA…do you think she felt real secure about things?”

“I was disappointed, but we never talked about splitting…”

“Oh, come on Aaron. How do you think she felt? And then she’s trapped on the boat with the one man in the world who was bound to torment, then abandon her – again. And what do you do? You abandon her, too? So yeah, why bring a kid into that world? What else is she gonna think? Her life has been one threat and abandonment after another, and all you did was validate her fears.”

I looked away, looked at a mist-enshrouded mountain across the inlet, and I could see Troubadour sitting comfortably at anchor beneath the rolling fog. Immediately I wanted to get out to her, pull up that anchor and set sail, head to New Zealand…hell, why not Antarctica? I could just keep on going, because circles never end, do they? Electric Karma was not supposed to end like that, but we were aborted, weren’t we? Five kids’ lives snuffed out by an air traffic controllers little mistake, another hundred kids’ lives ended by carelessness – so run away.

I didn’t sit with Jenn and try to help her reason things out. I ran away. I tossed an ultimatum in her lap like a hand grenade, then I ran from her room. I needed to run away, didn’t I? I didn’t fulfill me end of the bargain with Electric Karma. I ran away. Ran back to Pops, but I left them in Cleveland and they died. I should have ended when Deni and my mates did. But I ran. When Pops needed me most, when he got sick, I ran. I ran to Deni and my mates.

I was running in circles. I had nowhere to go, nothing important to do, so I was running in the mist, running into mountains of guilt – and trying to paint pretty pictures of my aborted life. What life? The life my parents wanted. Oh yeah, those parents. The parents I never knew. Had I been running ever since? And had they been running? Away from me? Away from their responsibilities to me?

So…what was out there before the Big Bang? What’s on the other side of that sky? What would happen if you put all the matter in the universe into a suitcase, then waved a magic wand, said a few magic words and poof – you made the suitcase disappear. What would be left?

Silly, huh?

Like running in the night, hiding from answers. Running in circles. Running into endless answers in search of their question.

+++++

So, I painted for a few months, helped Terry read through her lines – and this was comfortable for us; it was something I’d helped her do since forever. I still felt close to her, still liked to bask in her glow, and when it was time we flew to LA together. I dropped off some paintings at the gallery, sat on the soundstage and watched David and Terry work some screen magic, and I sat in the Polo Lounge every afternoon and watched people watching Terry, still proud of her for being so beautiful.

And I called Jenn’s dad, asked how she was doing.

“Why are you asking me?” he said. “Why don’t you call her. Why don’t you ask her what’s going on?”

“Because I’m asking you.”

“It’s a struggle, Aaron. I’m finding out more and more about her life. About the role I played in this, and I’m not happy. Are you happy, Aaron?”

“No.”

“No, I can’t imagine why you would be.”

“Should I try to see her while I’m here?”

“No. No, I can’t see that doing her any good now, but for the life of me I don’t know why you don’t come down and see your daughter.”

I think the word is thunderstruck.

“My – daughter?”

“Yes, your daughter.”

What followed lasted a half hour or so. I told him my version of events, he told me his. I told him I’d call my lawyer in the morning. He said that was fine with him. I hung up the phone, suddenly more concerned than anything else in the world that I had a baby girl – and she was being raised by that monster. I called the clinic on Moorea, left a message for Jennie to call me as soon as she got in. I went to Terry’s room in our bungalow out back and told her. She was aghast. I was sure Jennie would be, too, then, on a lark, I called my lawyer’s number – and she picked up.

She was working late, she said, on a big case going to trial in the morning, and I asked if she had a minute to listen to something important. She did, and I told her all I knew. Could she help, I asked. What do you want out of this, she wanted to know. Because if it’s raising a kid on a boat vs with her grandparents in a house in Newport Beach, you’re going to lose. I want to know why no one ever told me, I said. Well, she said, you left, didn’t you? Because, I said, she told me she’d had an abortion! Why am I the bad guy here, I wanted to know.

She listened, I could hear her taking notes and she asked me to give her a few days, then she’d get on it, highest priority.

I thanked her and let her go, then turned to Terry.

“What do you want, Aaron? When all is said and done, what do you want?”

And then I noticed she was laying out on the bed dressed like a lingerie model, right down to the five inch heels.

“What do you need, Aaron?” she said again, rolling over, spreading her legs just a little.

“What are you doing, Terry?”

“I’m going to give you what you need. What you’ve needed for a long, long time.”

“I don’t need this, Terry. Not now, not ever.”

“You’re wrong, Aaron. You’ve wanted me for as long as I’ve known you, and don’t deny it.”

“There’s a big difference between wanting and needing.”

“Not tonight, there isn’t.”

She stood and walked over to me, and really, I knew there wasn’t a damn thing I could do. She was an irresistible force, as gorgeous as any woman alive – and she’d baited her trap and waited for me to fall into her grasp. Now she had me, and she knew it. That night was the most sensuously vacuous I ever spent in my life, at once meaningless and as fraught with surreal consequence as any I ever enjoyed. When our night was over, she told me, it was over, but I remembered Jennie’s admonishments and knew it would never be over now.

I was back in my room when Jennie called, and I told her about my daughter and current circumstances vis my lawyer’s inferences.

“What do you want to do?” she asked. “Bring her out here?”

“That would be ideal, but the Shelly says that living on the boat…”

“That’s bullshit,” Jennie said. “There are kids on half the boats we run into out here, and beside, you have a house here, remember?”

“I forgot to mention that.”

“Well, don’t.”

“What about you? What do you think about all this?”

“I think you should try for some sort of joint custody. You take her now, and when Jenn is better you revert to some more traditional sharing structure.”

“That’s not what I mean. What about you? How would you feel about having her around?”

“Me? I’d love it, but it seems to me the biggest thing is to get her away from Jenn’s father.”

“Me too.”

“So, how’s LA?”

“The same, only worse.”

“Oh?”

“I watched Terry and David on the soundstage yesterday. They look good together.”

“Aaron, she’d look good with Hitler.”

I laughed. Maybe a little too much. “You got that right.”

“How are you, Aaron? You sound weird.”

“Weird?”

“Yeah. Weird.”

“I couldn’t sleep. I miss you.”

“I miss you too.”

“I’ll let you know when I hear something…”

So yes, a lie can be an act or omission, can’t it? And I had just lied, maybe the biggest lie of my life, to the most important woman in my life. And a few minutes later in walks Terry, still dressed to the nines, still hungry. And still I couldn’t say no to her. She was a cannibal, feasting on indecision – and she was hungry.

And maybe I wasn’t running in circles, I thought later that day. Maybe my circles were running after me, and I wasn’t moving fast enough to get out of their way. Then I remembered that sea lion in the drifting kelp. All those things I imagined circling in the night. Kill or be killed.

And then I realized I didn’t even know my daughter’s name.

OutBound (WIP/fragment 17 April ’17)

Posted on April 18, 2017 by adrianleverkuhnwrites

So, it turns out the past few days have been spent in a small room not of my choosing. BUT I had my faithful MacBookPro and wifi…and what else does a writer need? A sexier nurse would be nice, but here’s 25 pages of completely unedited text, not even one attempt at proofreading. Raw, I think you’d say. I may be home in a week or so, so I’ll continue working on this, as well as the last chapter of Elemental Mysteries.

outbound

OutBound

I’m sitting in my little inflatable, puttering through the anchorage off the town of Avalon, California, and it all looks so familiar. The beach is not quite a hundred feet away, the old casino still majestically presides over the harbor – now, and as it has all my life. The water below is still clear and deep blue, the white sandy bottom visible forty feet down, as relentlessly clear and full of promise now as it was in the late 60s. Nothing appears to have changed all that much out here, even my boat. Troubadour, my Alajuela 38, has seen a few miles under her keel, true enough, but she’s been in good hands all her life. My hands, as a matter of fact. And I’m looking at those hands as I ride through the anchorage off Avalon, the same hands that have cared for that boat over the last fifty years. My hands have changed a lot, and there are days I hardly recognize them, but when those moments find me I wonder what happened to time.

I remember looking at my grandfather’s hands once and wondering what all those brown spots were. Why his fingernails were kind of yellow and ridged. He had scars all over them, most from cuts he’d sewn up himself. He’d dip a needle and thread in whiskey and just sew himself up, and he didn’t think anything of it. It was what you did to stop the bleeding, so he did it and moved on to the next chore, which was what I did – more or less – over the years. Now, looking at my hand on the outboard motor’s tiller I recognized those hands again. They were mine, in a way, but they were my grandfather’s, too.

We sat and watched the Petrified Forest one night, that movie with Bogart and Davis, and he told me about his trip west in 1916. How there weren’t highways, not even a through road. He had a car, God knows how he afforded it, but he and my grandmother made the trip west together – from northeast Texas to Los Angeles. A few cities had paved streets but by and large the roads that connected cities were primitive affairs, often little more than sandy tracks through desert scrub. With the hard, narrow tires that cars had in those days, the wheels sunk down in the sand so deep that drive shafts were worn down by the mud and the sand, and he had to replace two solid steel shafts between El Paso and Flagstaff. Just polished down to nothing, worn down by the miles. Took them almost two weeks to make the trip, and he admitted to me that night he should have taken the train and bought a car once he got to LA, but that wasn’t my grandfather’s ethos. He wanted to get out there in the world, smell the road, meet people along the way and maybe have some fun and get in trouble too, because that’s what life was all about. I guess he passed that on to me, for better or worse, but I bought Troubadour and sailed away.

I didn’t plan things that way, however. Things just kind of happened.

The way things kind of happen. Unexpected things, the kind of people you never thought you’d run into, not in a million years. Doing things I never wanted to do, going places that held no interest to me. Life for me, before Troubadour, had been like the first thirty seconds of a roller coaster ride, the part where the ratcheting chain hauls you up the first huge incline. I was in the lead car right about then, looking out at the world during that little pause, just before the car takes off down that first steep drop. There’s this moment of anticipation, then a little exhilaration – soon followed by a dawning awareness that life might be far more interesting elsewhere, anywhere else than on a roller coaster. I never felt it in that moment before the fall, but about half way through my ride I began to develop an appreciation for smooth bicycles on warm country roads.

Which, I think, makes Troubadour all the more ironic. Troubadour has been a nonstop roller coaster ride, yet she’s like an old friend now. I know her aches and pains, her ups and downs, as well as I know my own – yet what makes that such an off-putting idea is she’s not flesh and bones. She’s a boat. A boat that became my life.

+++++

I started playing the piano in kindergarten, maybe a little before. I was pretty good too, for a five year old. My teacher, a crusty old man who kept a regal old Steinway grand in his music room, seemed to think I had talent, but I was always more interested in composing music, not playing. And not to make to big a deal about it, but I always hated performing in front of people. My first recital was a disaster, and that set the stage for many more over the years, and I think my reaction to that first trembling moment paved the way for Troubadour. I do okay one on one, or even with a people, but if you put me in a venue with hundreds of people I come undone. Just can’t do it, if you know what I mean. It’s not stage fright…it’s stage catatonia.

Anyway, some time in junior high a bunch of really hip kids decided to form a band. Mind you, these guys were like twelve years old and had never played an instrument in their lives, but two of them got electric guitars for Christmas and started banging out the four-chord progression of Louie-Louie, while one of them got a massive Ludwig drum set – because that’s what Ringo was using, don’t you know – and they needed someone who could play bass. Well, I could. I was playing both the acoustic bass and guitar by that point, and my grandfather had a massive pipe organ in his house that I had been playing for years, so I had that one under my belt by then too.

At any rate, they convinced me to join them and I guess you could say I taught them how to play their instruments over the next year. One of the kids, Pete, was a soulful guy who liked writing poetry and was getting decent on the drums, and he started putting lyrics to the music in his head and he’d share his musings with us and somehow real music started taking shape.

I looked back on those first compositions of ours as something really special, the wonder of coming of age condensed into two and a half minutes of pre-pubescent wailings about acne and nocturnal emissions. We were twelve, you see, yet even then sex had become the center of our existence, and we were pegged to play at our school’s Spring Dance the last weekend of our last year there. We had a couple of our own pieces to play but by and large we were set to grind out a bunch of Beatles and Stones songs, with me doing double duty on bass and keyboards.

I was, of course, terrified.

Not only were there several hundred people at that dance, I knew each and every one of them. I had chewed my fingernails down to bleeding stumps by the time we were set to take the stage, and I found that the only way I could play was to turn my back to the dance floor – so I did. For two hours I rocked and rolled and I didn’t have the slightest idea anyone else was out there, and when it was finally all over with I packed my stuff and went home – and vowed I’d never do anything like that ever again.

We were, of course, invited to participate in a local ‘battle of the bands’ contest to be held in early July, and we needed two songs of our own in order to be contestants so were turned Pete’s composition into something really special while I cobbled together something generic and altogether bland for our second entry and we practiced and practiced until we were blue in the face – then it was time to set up our instruments on what was indeed a really BIG stage.

“How many people are going to be here?” I asked one of the promoters.

“Oh, last year we had almost two thousand, but we’ve sold five thousand tickets so far…”

My knees were knocking by the time they announced us, but I turned the organ so I faced away from the lights and we launched into Pete’s soliloquy – a soothing, polished love song that just sounded silly when five twelve year olds sang it, but the girls out there loved it and they went wild.

Then we slipped right into ‘Lucy-Goosey’ – my hastily contrived fluff piece, and we brought down the house. We won, too. The contest, and we picked up a recording contract – with Lucy on the A side and Pete’s soliloquy on the flip side. The 45 sold a half million copies before we were in high school and as I was the songwriter listed on Lucy the lions share came to me.

And that was the end of that.

I haven’t mentioned my parents because, well, they died when I was young, like three years old. An airplane crash, a jetliner taking off from Mexico City, and really, I haven’t the slightest memory of either of them. I lived with my father’s father and his second wife, and I grew up in Beverly Hills. They were show business types, he a producer and she an actress of some repute, and I grew up around Hollywood types, lots of famous people I guess you could say, but my upbringing left me with a different sense of proportion. If people saw glamorous stars and western heroes, I saw sullen, moody drunks sitting by the pool out back – all fawning over my ‘grandmother’s’ legs. I mention all this only to add context to the sudden fame thrust on me after Lucy-Goosey went platinum later that summer.

I for my part, decided to concentrate on my classical compositions after that, which pissed a whole lot of people off, but I did all through high school and into college, and by that time what fame the song generated had all but slipped away – and I was grateful, because I considered the piece pure garbage.

So I went to Stanford unencumbered by that baggage, and studied composition and philosophy with no ends in mind – until a friend asked me to join a group he was putting together and it became more widely known that I had penned Lucy, once upon a time.

“I always wondered what happened to you,” Deni Dalton said, and that’s how we met, Deni and I. She had this smokey voice that seemed to seethe dark sexuality, and when she looked you in the eye I felt like a banana being peeled in the monkey house. Whatever protective layers I had on that day, say that look of smug condescension I liked to slip on from time to time, she cut through that crap like a hot scalpel through bloody fat. She was Music. She was bigger than life. I was in love, but then again everyone who laid eyes on her fell in love. She always wore black, too. Black hair and black eyes, heavy black makeup – she was Goth before there was such a thing.

And she had kind of a black heart, too. Mercenary, I guess. Not educated yet smart. She read people like others read books, and she had a nose for money, was always looking for the angle that would lead to fame and fortune. I think she took one look at me and saw her opening.

“Your Dad still with Universal?” she asked.

“My father died when I was three.”

“Aaron Dorsin? He’s not your pops?”

“My grandfather.”

“Oh, right. He’s still with Universal, ain’t he?”

“Last I heard.”

“Well, we’re looking for someone new on keys, and Luke says we should give a listen. So, I’m listening.”

We were in the living room of this run down three story house in Berkeley, and all there was in the room, besides a dozen or so people on a u-shaped sofa, was an old upright piano – and then one of the girls on the sofa went down on the guy sitting next to her.

So…I looked at her for a moment and started playing to her rhythm, then Deni caught where I was and she stood and started swaying to the music coming from the girl’s mouth. I was drifting between Bartok and Dave Evans until she hit the short strokes, then I just let the music flow for a while, a loose, swirling flow, and Deni came to me and kissed me for a long time, before she played a little music of her own.

And so began a very interesting time in my life. I like to think of it as my purple paisley patchouli period, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

+++++

It was a funky house, of that much I was certain. Channing Way was kind of an epicenter of seismic music in Berkeley for a few years back in the late sixties, and maybe Deni’s purple house was our ground zero. Her background was coffee house folk, kind of a dark California counterpoint to Paul Simon’s more upbeat New York vibe, and you might get that if irony is your thing. If Simon had inherited Gershwin, Deni had been mainlining Thelonius Monk for years – yet she felt like she was ready for bigger sounds. She wanted to create fat, epochal rock, anthems for a new generation already grown tired of Beatlemania. She didn’t want cool reflections, she wanted steamrollers and wrecking balls. Most of all, she didn’t want to play small clubs anymore. She wanted to hit college campuses and then, maybe, if she got lucky, move on to bigger and better things, but she saw rock and roll as a doorway, an entry into something really big and bold.

To me, as a keyboardist in 1968, big and bold meant synthesizers and mellotrons. Those two instruments, I surmised, might allow some of the more bombastic elements of classical forms to merge with the more simplistic forms of rock that seemed to be yearning for bombast – and like every other classically trained musician on the planet I realized Sgt Peppers had shown us the way to the door, while Pet Sounds had given us the courage to break on through to the other side. Martin and the Beatles began introducing classical motifs on Sgt Peppers, but it was Fixing A Hole that caught fire in Deni’s mind. The Beatles married the baroque to old English choral music and it was brilliant, but it wasn’t American. The Beatles were a Jaguar XK-E, something restrained and elegant, gorgeous yet full of unrealized potential; what Deni wanted a Shelby Cobra with glowing pipes, something untamed and unleashed, music that would overpower the soul and make people scream when elation overpowered sensibility.

She had cred in the music business, but not a lot, not the kind I’d had, anyway – but what I did have was my grandfather. He was fairly high up on the food chain at Universal, and their MCA Records division wanted to cash in on the exploding pop/rock business. We retreated into the house on Channing Way one February day and didn’t come out again until May, and three of us hopped in someone’s old VW Microbus and tooled down the 101 to Burbank and went to my grandfather’s office.

He was old then, seriously old, but he was also sharp as a tack. We walked in and he looked at us like we’d just crawled out from under a rock, which, I have to say wasn’t far from the truth.

“Aaron,” he asked when he quasi-recognized me, “is that you under there?”

You see, by 1968 my hair was hanging down somewhere south of my knees, and George Harrison’s beard had nothing on mine.

“Hey Pops,” I said, ‘Pops’ being my characteristic greeting. “We need a recording studio. I want to cut an album.”

I am not, you understand, one to waste time on idle chit-chat.

“Oh?” he said, with one raised eyebrow.

One eyebrow meant he was listening. Two meant you needed to start running for the door.

So I tossed our demo down on his desk, a big Tascam reel-to-reel spool, and he looked at it, then at Deni. And you have to understand this about Pops: he was only interested in her by this point. If she could sing, great, but she had great tits and I could see that working over in his mind – as in: she’ll look great on an album cover. He had no interest in her physically, only in the commercial appeal of Deni’s tits.

So he picks up his phone and dials an extension.

“Lou? Aaron’s here, and he has a demo. Can I send him up now?”

So off we went, off to see the wizard. A dozen people gathered and listened to our demo and we walked out an hour later with a recording contract. We hopped in the VW and drove back up the 101 in a blinding rainstorm, got back to the purple house a little after midnight – and Deni attacked me then. In a good way, if you know what I mean. We came up for air a few days later and the really interesting thing about that time is we both realized we were like heroin to one another. We were dangerously intoxicated when we mixed, so much so we knew we were in danger of losing ourselves, each to the other.

After those two days and nights together Deni dropped the whole Black Goth thing and went in for this deep purple paisley look. Flowing silk capes of purple, and the house began to reek of patchouli. Patchouli incense was burning 24/7, and she put patchouli oil in everything, notably the polish she used to wipe down her rosewood furniture. The scent wasn’t quite overpowering, but it was close, and the whole patchouli thing became indelibly linked to those months. I can’t not think of her when I run across that scent.

Anyway, we loaded up all our gear and ambled back to Burbank a week later, and we had several days booked to get the sound we wanted down on tape. I’ve since read books on musicians of that era, these being little more than monographs of artistic egoism run amok, and I shudder to think what would have happened to us if that had been the case. Instead, it seemed as if Deni and her mates knew this was their one big shot, and they had to get the job done this time or prepare to wait tables for the rest of their lives. We came together, in other words, and the results were something else.

We ended up spending a month in the studio, yet before we were finished MCA released a single that shot up the charts into the top-10, and on the strength of that alone they booked us to play three nights at the Universal Amphitheater later that summer – and I didn’t think anything about it at the time, maybe because I was so wrapped up in the moment.

Deni was a lyricist, a good one too, but she wasn’t quite what I’d have called an original. She listened to other recording artists all the time, listening for inspiration and ideas. New ways to spin a phrase, new transitions between parts of a song – yet she couldn’t read or write music, what’s called notation. She had an instinctual grasp of the inherent musical order within a phrase, but she couldn’t see structure when expressed in notes and chords. This wasn’t a big deal as I looked at the innate phrasing of her lyrical constructs and went from there, and as she wrote stuff she’d come and sing variations to me. Not a big deal, and most pop music is created that way these days, but it was a big move away from the classical paradigm – where arias were derived from the inherent structure within a passage of music.

An unknown named Elton John showed up while we were in the studio and he dropped by, listened for a while then disappeared, and I dropped by one of his sessions a few days later and was blown away by his exuberance, his showmanship – even in the studio. And it hit me then, my lump on a log stage mannerism. I was not and would never be an Elton John. He was an impressionist masterpiece, and I was a Dutch still life, destined to reside on the edge of the stage, the edge of the world, my back to the action – and I knew there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. As soon as the lights went up I began to freeze inside, like my mind was suddenly and completely encased in brittle ice.

So, the album was released and it was a bigger hit than even Pops thought it would be. And yes, there was lots of cleavage on the front cover. Purple paisley and cleavage. We played a few small gigs on Sunset and Hollywood, a few parties in the Hills of Beverly too, and we started mapping out our second album during that time, too. Then our first night at the Amphitheater came up and everything inside just kind of snapped. I couldn’t even walk out on stage for our practice session that afternoon, and for the first time what had been kind of a modest idiosyncrasy turned into a real liability. I looked at my mates looking at me and I knew they couldn’t understand…hell, I didn’t understand…but this was something that could seriously fuck up their chances of making it big.

Pops called a doc, some Beverly Hills shrink, and she came out and gave me a shot in the hip, told me to rest for a half hour, and she went with me and we talked.

She looked like Faye Dunaway, if you know who I mean. About fifty, blond hair and seriously gorgeous. Smart? Dear God. It was like she had this ability to look inside souls, take an inventory and figure out what was wrong. Me? It was all about losing my parents when I was a kid. My dad was an actor and he had gone down to Mexico, to Acapulco, to receive some kind of award, and their plane crashed on the way back, so yeah, separation anxiety lead to more and more anxieties and Pops had no idea. Hell, neither did I. Anyway, understanding did not lead to catharsis and by the time showtime rolled around I was no better but the docs magic potion helped me keep it together long enough to do the show, and while it was magic, the ovations and the wild applause, as I walked offstage I passed right out. Down like a sack of potatoes, still on stage.

Or so I read in newspaper accounts the next morning. Despite not having diabetes the episode was ascribed to hypoglycemia and that was that. I spend all day working with a studio musician who would be on standby, a kind of understudy, in case I cratered that night – and of course I did.

I watched from backstage as this stranger played my music, and in fact he played better than I had, a supple fact not lost on Deni and my bandmates. I didn’t even show up for the third night’s performance, and when we returned to Berkeley the next day everyone tried to not make a big deal about it – but I knew something had changed between us. We all did, Deni most of all. I felt like damaged goods, a broken doll that not even all the king’s men could glue back together, but we started writing music again and pretty soon all was forgotten.

We went back to Burbank a few months later and started laying down tracks when word came that we were going to tour North America in the fall and Europe the coming winter and I started going to the shrink in Beverly Hills. Maybe she could help me, I told my mates. Yeah, maybe, they said.

Then a funny thing happened. The shrink invited me to go sailing with some friends of hers the next morning. I accepted the invitation, too, if only because I wanted to get to know her better, and I ran out and got a haircut too. Bought some boat shoes, of all things, and some natty red sailing shorts to go with them.

The boat, a huge racing yacht that had been famous in the 30s, belonged to her husband, of course, a billionaire property developer who owned half of LA, and they had a professional crew sailing the boat so all I had to do was sit around and look interested in my boat shoes, but the truth of the matter was I did indeed find myself interested. In fact, the idea of sailing away from all my anxiety seemed very enticing. I talked to the skipper about boats and sailing for a few hours and I learned a lot that afternoon.

There was another couple on the boat that day, a property developer from Newport Beach who had brought his wife and daughter along. The girl was maybe two years younger than I, and she was studying some kind of psychology at UC Irvine. And she loved our album. Her name was, of course, Jennifer. Every other girl in OC is named Jennifer, has been since the beginning of time.

She looked like one of Southern California’s home grown Hitler Youth so common to Orange County back in the day: rich, privileged, blond haired and blue eyed, yet she was sweet – and she loved sailing. Well, I thought I might love sailing too so we had something in common, right? Anyway, we talked boats and I figured out pretty quick she knew a lot more about boats than I ever would, that she’d grown up around boats, and also that she really, really liked our first album. She even had an original 45 of Lucy-Goosey, bless her heart, and we went out for a burger after we got back to the marina, then I drove her down to Newport, to her dorm at UCI, but when we got there she pointed me towards the beach and we went down to the peninsula, watched the moon fall on Catalina just before the sun decided to show up for a return engagement.

There was a boat show in Newport, she told me, usually in April or May, and she wanted to know if I’d come down and go to it with her. I said ‘sure, sounds fun’ before I knew what had happened, and we looked at one another when I dropped her off at the dorm like we were not quite sure where this was going. I wanted to kiss her, and I could tell she wanted me to, but I couldn’t – because I was afraid, and I told her so, too. I told her about seeing the shrink, about my looming performance anxiety and she seemed to understand. Anyway, I gave her my number at Pop’s house and she leaned over and kissed me once, gently, then again, not so gently, and then she told me I didn’t have anything to be worried about where she was concerned and everything kind of slipped into place after that. Right there in the car, as a matter of fact.

We finished the second album over the next few weeks then took a break, our first big tour not scheduled to begin for a month or so, and I went to Pop’s house to unwind. Everything seemed pretty much the same there, except Pops seemed to be slowing down, and suddenly, too. He said his back hurt more than it had recently I talked him into going to see his doc.

And Jennifer called my first night there, said she was going to be at the marina Saturday and wanted to know if I wanted to go out on a new boat. Sure, I said, and we set a time to meet up – and after that I couldn’t think about anything other than her – until my next appointment with the shrink, anyway. Pop’s internist was in the same building as mine so I dropped him off for his appointment then ducked in for mine, but when I came back for him he was still inside so I sat and waited.

And waited.

And a nurse came out and asked for me, led me back to an office – where I found Pops all red-eyed and an old internist handing him tissues. Prostate cancer, advanced well into the spine was the preliminary diagnosis, but biopsies would be done early Monday morning and we’d go from there. We left and he was pissed off because the same doc had told him a year ago the pain was probably related to a fall he’d taken a few years before. Maybe if he’d been more thorough he’d have a chance, he said, because if it had moved into the spine that was it.

“That was it?”

I understand my parents died when I was three, but since then no one I knew had kicked the bucket – and now, all of a sudden, the most important person in my life was telling me he was going to die, soon? That this was it?

I had an emotional disconnect about that time, I guess you might say. I was a little more concerned with my well being than his in that moment, a little more than afraid. No, let me rephrase that. I fell apart and we held on to one another there in the lobby for way too long, then we walked over to Nate ‘n Al’s for bagels and lox. He called some of his buddies from the studio, told them to come over for a few hands of poker – which was code for ‘shit has hit the fan’ and we sat there watching the ice melt in our glasses of iced tea, neither of us knowing what the hell to say to one another. My grandmother, his wife, would surely come apart at the seams tonight, he said, then this lanky gentleman walks in and comes over to our booth and sits down next to me.

Jimmy Stewart, in town between shoots and an old friend of the family, looked at Pops and sighed. “Aaron, you look just awful. Now tell me, what’s going on here?”

So Pops lays it out there and then Jimmy is all upset, the ice in his iced tea is melting along with ours, then he finally turns and looks at me.

“Heard that album of yours. It sure isn’t Benny Goodman, is it?”

Pops broke out laughing at that. “It sure isn’t, but that lead singer of theirs sure has great gonzagas. World class, if you know what I mean.”

Stewart rolled his eyes, shook his head. “All he can think about at a time like this is tits. Aaron? You’ll never change.”

“Amen to that, brother,” Pops said. “What do you have in that sack, Jimmy? Another model airplane?”

“Yup, yup. Me and Henry, you know how that goes?”

“Did you ever see his model room, Aaron?” Pops asked me.

“Yessir, been a few years, but…”

“I was building that B-52, wasn’t I?” Jimmy recalled. “Wingspan this big,” he said, holding his hands about a mile apart and we all laughed. He got up and patted Pops on the shoulder a minute later, told him he’d call soon, then he ambled over to a table where Gloria was already waiting and I could see the expression on her face.

I got up early and drove down to the marina, met Jennifer at the anointed hour and she took me down to a slip below an apartment building and hopped aboard a brand new Swan 4o. There were two other girls onboard already and they slipped the lines, let Jennifer back the boat out of the slip while they readied the sails. We sailed out of the marina after that, then turned south for Palos Verdes – and with barely enough wind to fill the sails the girls soon gave up and turned the engine on. Seems they were delivering the boat from the marina to it’s new owner down at the LA Yacht Club and I was along for the ride, and by the time we cleared the Point Vicente lighthouse we had enough wind to raise sail again and had a rip-roaring nine mile sleigh ride after that.

That was difference between 40 feet and 83. The smaller boat felt almost alive compared to the old J-class boat I’d sailed on the week before, and I found myself mesmerized by the sensation. I didn’t know it at the time, but Jennifer studied my face that day, told me once she was reliving her earliest sailing experiences by watching my reactions that day. She was very dialed into me, I guess you could say, even then.

We turned the boat over to her new owner and drove down to Newport, stopped and had an early dinner at The Crab Cooker, and after we dropped off the girls she drove me back up to the marina, and I told her about Pops then, about what my grandfather really meant to me, and she remained quiet all the while, let me ramble until we pulled into the lot where I’d left my car. She parked and turned to face me, leaned the side of her face on the seat and stared at me.

“What are you going to do now?” she asked. “Try to go on tour?”

“I don’t think I can do that. I need to be here now.”

She nodded her head. “I think so, too. You need anyone to talk to, just call me. Any time, day or night. Got it?”

I nodded my head, then looked her in the eye. “What happens if I fall in love with you?”

“If?” she said, grinning.

“Okay. When I fall in love with you?”

“Are you sure you haven’t already?”

I can still feel that moment. Like it was the most important moment of my life, those precious seconds are still right there with me, wherever I go.

“I know exactly when I fell in love with you,” I said.

“Oh?”

“About a minute ago. Before that I was fighting it.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“I think you’ve been fighting it all day. I know I have.”

“You want to go meet my Pops?”

She nodded her head. “Yeah. I think that’d be a good thing?”

So we went. She met Pops and he loved her too, which was kind of a good thing. It was the first time I’d ever come home with a girl, and the moment wasn’t lost on either of us. My grandmother was a little coy about the whole thing, a little too reserved one minute then effusive the next, but by the time we left she’d come around too.

“So, you’re the one?” Pops asked when he walked us to the driveway out front, and Jennifer didn’t know what to say just then, but I did.

“Yeah, Pops, she’s it. You mind if we run off to Vegas and do the deed, or did you want us to do it here?”

“Let’s all go to Vegas,” he said. “I can hit the tables after, and who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky,” he added, popping my grandmother lightly on her tail-feathers.

And we all laughed at that, even my grandmother, but we weren’t fooling anyone. Not by a long shot.

“He’s kind of cool,” Jennifer said as we drove back to the marina. “Old school, I guess.”

“He is that. Not many like him left in this town.”

“Thanks for letting me meet him. Even if you were joking…”

And I looked at her just then, like maybe I’d been joking, and maybe I hadn’t. And she looked at me, too.

“You were joking, weren’t you?”

“We’ve known each other a week,” I said. “Maybe it would be nuts, but I haven’t been able to think about anything but you for days.”

And she nodded her head, looked down and didn’t say a word.

“What about you,” I asked. “Am I too late? Already spoken for?”

“I was serious about a guy in high school, and we kept dating after, even after I went to Stockton and he went to SC. We broke up six months ago, well, at Christmas.”

“What happened?”

“He met a girl, I guess. ‘Someone better’ was the way he put it.”

“Jeez. That was nice.”

“Yeah, you could put it that way.”

“No one since?”

She shook her head. “It messed with my head pretty bad. We’re seeing the same shrink, you know?”

No, I didn’t, but it kind of made since now so I nodded my head. “What happened?” I asked.

“Pills. My roommate found me in time, got me to the ER. Pumped my stomach, that scene. I came home after that. Haven’t been back, really.”

“You going to finish your degree?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Anything else you want to do?”

“I like sailing, that’s about all though. Dad put up some money to get a sailboat maker up and running, and I’m going to start working in the marketing and sales department this summer. I guess we’ll see how it goes.”

“Sounds kind of fun. Not a lot of stress, anyway, and doing something you love.”

“What about you? You going to keep playing?”

“Composing, anyway, and working on the studio tracks. We have a studio musician who’s preparing to go out on the road if I can’t handle our next concert.”

“Where’s it going to be?”

“San Francisco, at the Fillmore. Hendrix is going to be there, some Brits, too. Should be a scene.”

“Wow…”

“You wanna come up?”

“You sure you want me to?”

“You know, we were talking about getting married a few minutes ago. Nothing’s changed.”

She looked at me again and I could see it all over her face, in her eyes. Not quite shame, but a real close cousin. Something deeper than embarrassed, anyway. Trying to kill yourself – and failing – had to be hard to deal with by yourself, but to lay it all out there like she just had? She either had guts or she wanted to see how real I was. The thing is, I wasn’t running. I think I started to really fall for her after that. I mean a deep kind of falling in love, like I wanted to take care of her. I know that seems a little off, but when I saw her vulnerabilities I wanted to be stronger so I could help her carry the load.

And I think that was a turning point for me.

Anyway, when we made it to her car we got out and walked around the marina for a while, looked at boats and talked about sailing – and I held her hand all the while. The thought I’d let go of her in a minute or two, let her drive back to Newport without me was hitting home real hard, a lot harder than I expected, and I stopped in front of a hotel there, turned her into my arms and I just held onto her. Maybe like forever, if you know what I mean, then I kissed her, told her that I loved her and maybe we should go get a room.

I remember those eyes of hers. Looking up at me then, so full of lingering intensity. She was so insanely gorgeous, too, probably the most beautiful girl I’d ever known, and if that asshole hadn’t fucked her up she would have been okay – or at least I kept telling myself that over the years. And hell, who knows, maybe I believed it, too, but she was fragile after that breakdown. Always was, right up to the day she left me.

+++++

I drove up to Berkeley a few days later; it was time to start rehearsing for the Fillmore gig. That ‘feeling stronger’ vibe stuck with me, too, and I felt good about going out on stage for the first time in my life. Deni picked up on the vibe, and she was ecstatic about the whole Jennifer thing, too. Rehearsals went great and I picked Jennie up the night before we were set to play, and we went down in time to listen to The Nice. There weren’t many of us trying to bring new technology onstage, and while Keith Emerson was creating quite a storm on stage everyone was hanging around in this haze of expectation, waiting for Hendrix.

He was the current God du jour, but for any keyboardists watching that night Emerson was surreal. Here was someone, finally, bringing classical structure into rock, and while his rendering of Simon’s America was electric, what caught me was a piece called the Five Bridges Suite, which fused classical with jazz and rock. About halfway through that piece I started to look around at the crowd and a kind of swaying trance had taken hold. People didn’t want to dance now, they had been transported somewhere else, someplace deep within Music, deeper than I’d ever thought possible. Even Jennie said “wow!” when those guys wrapped up and drifted into the crowd…

But when finally Jimi came out and the place erupted, and when The Experience started in with Fire you could understand what the electricity was all about. I hung on til they finished up with The Wind Cries Mary, and when I looked around the place I could feel something else passing through the crowd, something hard to put my finger on, but what struck me was the power music held over the crowd. Something awesome and huge, some force I’d never reckoned with before, and what got to me right then was Emerson. He was watching the crowd too, gauging the sudden surge of empathy, and I guess like me he was lost inside the wonder of the moment.

Another thing that hit me just then: the amount of pot hanging in the air. From fifty feet back the air was literally a purple haze, and with the multi-colored stage lights bathing the area around Hendrix the atmosphere was otherworldly. I knew a couple of cops were working the back of the crowd, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be them in this place. After the ‘free-speech’ demonstrations across the bay over the last few months, their was another ‘something’ hanging in the air, apparent, and it weren’t purdy, if you know what I mean. And that vibe was the raw underbelly of music at the Fillmore…

Sure, a lot of the music was about ‘peace and love’ but there was an awful lot of anger in the air; even so there was this Hell’s Angels vibe too, an undercurrent of outlaw malevolence that felt rooted in the desire to burn everything down to the ground. That was San Francisco then and I suspect it’s always been that way. Like some people working the fringes wanted to create something new, but to me it felt like this Fillmore fringe didn’t really care who got burned along the way. So, yeah, I think there was real anarchy in this group, like this new fringe wanted their parent’s world to dissolve within the purple haze hanging over that crowd inside the Fillmore, all emotion rooted in infantile rebellion, the tantrums of spoiled children.

Yet sometimes children are right, too.

That was in the air, too. Even the music. Our parent’s forms and structures, subverted and inverted, creating something new, anarchic and inclusive. Like the Beatles opened the doors to polite society and now the riffraff was rushing in – burning babies in Electric Ladyland. Music was, right before our eyes, becoming more political than it had in a hundred years, when Wagner politicized opera in post-Napoleonic Europe. If you think that’s trivial stuff, just consider for a moment that Marx grew out of that music, and so did Darwin.

So yeah, something was stirring in the underbelly of that crowd. Something big and noisy, and maybe ugly, too.

+++++

We were the first gig of the night, so we set up early and I looked around the place while I helped hook up the Moog and Mellotron. The air clear now, the room didn’t look all that big, like a place full of magic. Just a room, I thought, not unlike many others around this city, yet I had felt those forces last night. Emerson had too. We talked after Hendrix left, talked about the vibe we’d seen and felt, and we talked in epochal terms about music shape-shifting to the needs of the moment. About the politics of music. We talked Nixon and Vietnam and John Wayne and about the image of a girl who had put a flower down the barrel of a National Guardsman’s rifle. Everything was linked, he said, but the links weren’t easy to see – not yet, anyway. Music had to become the fabric that joined all these disparate factions, and musicians had to claim their place as leaders of this movement. Heady stuff, and even Jenn seemed caught up in the moment.

Yet standing up there on that stage looking out over that empty room it was hard to see music as anything other than a diversion. Maybe we were the sideshow to the real action. I’d just read Jerry Rubin’s ‘Do It!’ – a real anarchist’s manifesto – and I wondered: could music take on that weight, shoulder that burden? Or would music fragment the way society seemed to be fragmenting?

Even when I worked with Deni it was there – this impulse to fly apart, to head off in uncharted new directions. There wasn’t some unseen political hand pushing us towards a grand unified theory of musicians leading a movement. Most of the kids on stage were just that: they liked to play the guitar or the keys. We got off on making music together, and I can’t recall ever sitting around and saying “Wow, did you see those riots up on campus today! We got to write about that!”

Yeah, but there was one anthem out there that contradicts all that. For What It’s Worth, by the Buffalo Springfield – and maybe that’s the vibe Emerson was channeling that night in the haze – but the idea hit me then that I had always seen music as a reflection of events, not a means to change things, but maybe it could be both and I’d never really seen it as such – and I had an idea.

I hadn’t played Lucy-Goosey in years. The music had dissolved into that early Beatles-like haze of I Wanna Hold Your Hand and She Loves You, Yeah-Yeah-Yeah, but it was still there, buried somewhere in our collective unconscious – so what if we…

Deni was kind of entranced by the whole thing, too, and she came up with a few bridges to make the pop refrains relevant once again. Lucy was going to go from bubble-gum chewing sycophant to radical anarchist on stage tonight, and the whole thing was taking shape in a burst of creativity that had come out of nowhere, man.

When the lights went down a slide was projected on the wall behind the stage, an image of that girl sticking a daisy down the barrel of the guardsman’s rifle, and I walked out and got behind the keyboards – then turned and looked at Jennifer standing in the shadows backstage and I smiled, then turned to face the sea of faces and raised my fist, then the room went black – with just a small spot on me, and that image of the girl hanging back there behind the purple haze.

I started with the simplest piano refrains from Lucy-Goosey and the sea of faces went silent as quiet expectation replaced hyped anticipation, and my piano was almost in chopsticks mode: simple notes even a child could play, awakening memory. Our lead guitar stepped out and another spot hit him, and he started echoing my simplistic melody. Deni came out next and the crowd erupted, then as quickly shut down as she started into an even simpler, quieter version of my original lyric, and she turned to a small harp and echoed my notes as the lights faded, leaving only the image of the girl – which soon faded to black as my piano grew softer, then silent. In the darkness the rest of the band came out and when the lights flared we turned Lucy into a molotov cocktail throwing radical with what I’d say presaged a grungy-heavy metal infused sound – music that no one in the audience had heard before – and the surge of energy was cataclysmic. I kept the simple piano melody going, but that was echoed by soaring, dark chords on the Mellotron, and with Deni’s inverted lyrics Lucy’s transformation was complete.

And I felt that transformation in my soul, too, like I’d just grown up. The insecure teenager died out there that night, and when we walked offstage an hour later I walked into Jennifer’s arms and held on tight, because I knew the ride was about to get real bumpy.

+++++

Pops was a lot sicker than he let on, and he kept everything wrapped up and put away, out of sight. Every time I called he was ‘fine, doing great’ – and Terry, his wife, my ‘grandmother’ went along with his charades, and it worked ‘til we came to LA to play several concerts around town. I went home after our first and when I saw him I burst out crying. I couldn’t help it.

“Do I look that bad?” he asked.

He looked like an orange scarecrow, only worse.

“The color,” he said, “is from liver failure. I kind of like it, too. Like a walking traffic sign, don’t you think? When I walk out of the doctor’s office everyone stops and stares.”

I felt sick, too, just looking at him, and then Terry told me he had maybe a month or two left, and I kind of fractured when I heard that. Like I didn’t know what to think. Pops was my last link to an almost invisible past, and without him I would be well and truly alone. There weren’t any brothers or sisters or aunts and uncles, there was just me and Pops. I was going to be, if I remained alone and childless, the last of the line.

And that was a big question hanging in the air between us.

What’s with Jennifer, he wanted to know.

“We’re good,” I said, but there was something else hanging in the air. That whole fragile thing. She was depressed, and when she started going down that hole she turned to dolls to pick her back up. Dolls, as in The Valley of The. Pills, in other words, and here I need to digress a little. I didn’t do pills. I didn’t smoke – anything. I didn’t drink much, because I didn’t like the whole idea of losing control. I know, like the idea we have some kind of control is an almost comic idea, but the point is we do have the ability to control some things, and losing what little I had was to me a Very Bad Thing. I tripped all I wanted when I disappeared inside my music, but I could come out of it intact and lucid. I had Deni disappear down the LSD rabbit hole and not come out for days, and that scared the shit out of me. We’d been through two lead guitarists over the course of a year simply because one drug or another had taken them someplace they just couldn’t break free of, and I wasn’t going there.

So when I saw Jennifer headed down the same road I told her it worried me, and she told me to fuck off. So I did. I put her on a plane back to her father and told him what was going down, and what I heard back from him wasn’t worth mentioning, but he’d thought he was done with her and wasn’t happy to have her back under his roof.

I started spending more and more time in LA, spending as much time with Pops as I could, and my understudy started filling in more often when he started the terminal decline. We were in Cleveland when Terry called me, told me to come home, and it was about five hours before the show that night when I called Deni and told her. She came to my hotel room and we talked, and she told me to take my time, that they’d manage without me and I held her for the longest time. We’d been together as a group for more than two years by then, and I realized she was about the closest thing to family I’d have left – and I told her so.

“I never wanted you to be my brother, Aaron,” she told me. “All I know is we work well together, like I always imagined a husband would be, ya know?”

“That day, you remember?”

“Yeah. Love heroin. I’ll never forget. I’ve never loved anyone like I loved you,” she sighed, and then she was crying. “God, I don’t want you to go. Something’s going to happen to you back there. Something fuckin’ big’s coming, and I feel like it’s going to crush you, man.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do without him, Den. I’m scared, and with Jenn gone? I don’t know, man, I don’t know…”

“I’m here. Don’t you forget that.” She looked at me and we kissed, I mean like the last time we kissed, and I was full of these bizarre electric charges flicking off like lightning all over my skin, then she looked at me again. “I love you, and I will forever” she sighed, then we kissed again, and this time we were hovering beyond the abyss, ready to fall into bed, but she pulled back and ran from the room.

I got my bags together and made it out to the airport in time to catch a one-stop to LAX, and made it to the house a little after midnight. I went to Pop’s room and we sat and got caught up while Terry left to put on tea, but she came back in a few minutes later, her eyes full of grief. She turned on the TV and there were news reports of an airplane crash, a flight from Cleveland to Buffalo, and a hundred and fifteen people, including all members of the group Electric Karma, were feared dead.

I blinked, recoiled from the very idea Deni and all my mates were gone, that the sum total of our existence had been wiped from the slate in the blink of an eye, but the pictures on the screen told a very different story. A midair collision about a mile out over Lake Erie, and the 707 had burst into flames and fluttered down to the water, then slipped beneath black water.

Pops died the next day.

+++++

Jennifer thought I died that night and she came undone. Razor blades this time, and she’d meant to take herself out, no doubt about it. By the time I called their house the next morning the damage was done, though I didn’t find out for a few more hours. When I talked to her father later that day he sounded relieved and furious, and I told him I’d be down as soon I could. He said he understood and we left it at that, and Pops slipped into a morphine induced coma later that afternoon. We didn’t say goodbye, but when I held his hand I could feel him respond to my words. When I told him he meant the world to me, and that I’d miss him most of all he squeezed my hand, and I could hear him talking to me. All the talks we’d had over the years were still right there, and Terry was with me, holding on to me, when he slipped away.

She was English. Had had a good run in Hollywood after the war, made a half dozen romantic comedies with the likes of Cary Grant and, yes, Jimmy Stewart, so when Pops moved on it was a big deal in Hollywood circles, yet the death of my bandmates cast a long shadow over the whole affair. Everyone knew about Pops and me, how tight we were, yet Terry was big surprise – to me. I’d never really appreciated how close they were too, but one look at her and you knew it wasn’t an act. She stopped eating for a month, literally, and wasted away to nothing – and then I had to admit I really felt something for the woman. She wasn’t just Pop’s third wife, she too became the one last link I had to him, one I’d never realized existed, and all of a sudden I was scared she might die too.

And let’s not forget Jennifer, lying, in restraints, in a psychiatric hospital tucked deep inside the hills above Laguna Beach. I started driving down to Laguna every other day, then every morning, and I spent hours with Jennifer then drove back up to Beverly Hills, back to Pop’s house, and I tried to get Terry out of her funk.

About three weeks into this routine I decided to take Terry with me down to Laguna, try to get Terry to see what the real contours of falling into depression looked like, and it worked. That day marked a big turnaround for all of us, because she reached out to Jenn and they connected.

Like a lot of people around that time, I’d recently seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, and to me that time felt a lot like one of the key passages in the movie. When Hal goes bonkers and cuts Frank adrift, and Dave goes after his tumbling body in the pod – helmet-less. I wasn’t sure if I felt more like Dave, or Frank, but I knew everything was tumbling out of control and I was the only one who could set things straight.

Like Pops had set me straight after my parents died, I knew it was my turn at the controls, and I didn’t want to let either Pops or my old man down. Hell, by this point I didn’t want to let Jennifer’s father down. Whatever was wrong with Jenn, I saw then that her old man was probably behind a lot of it – so I’d in effect sent her back into the snake pit.

Nope. Not again. When you tell someone that you love them, you don’t do that. It’s a simple proposition, really. Either you mean what you say or what you say is meaningless, and now I took that to heart.

I loved Jenn. Simple as that. And I loved Terry, too. Simple as that.

So, let me tell you a little more about Terry.

She met Pops when he was in his late sixties. They got married when she was thirty three. She was forty four now, and every bit the Hollywood starlet she had been just a few years ago, and in the aftermath of her decision to rejoin the living she decided she was either going to move back to London and take up work on the stage, or make another movie. Maybe a bunch of movies.

And she wanted to know how I felt about her moving back to London. Specifically, did I want to her remain in LA, remain a part of my life, or did I want her to move on.

Mind you, I had just turned twenty seven so I wasn’t exactly a babe in the woods, and I’d never considered her my grandmother. She came into my life when I was sixteen, when she was considered one of the most desirable women in the world. Let’s just say I’d spent a few sleepless nights over her and leave it at that, and I think you’ll grasp the contours of my own little dilemma.

So, I told her ‘Hell no!’ I didn’t want her to just move on. I told her she was an important part of my life with Pops, and that she would always be important to me. The problem I didn’t quite wrap my head around is she didn’t see it that way. She’d spend ten plus years married to man who hadn’t been able to perform his marital duties for, well, a long time, and she was just entering her prime. The biggest part of the problem was the simplest, most elemental part, too. I still found her attractive, devastatingly so.

There was a part coming up, just being cast, where she’d get prime billing next to some very big names, and she’d gone to the audition dressed to kill. When she came back she was elated; she’d gotten the part and shooting began, in France, in three weeks. She wanted to celebrate and so we went down to The Bistro – where her landing the part was all the buzz. Everyone came by to congratulate her – and offer condolences – and everyone looked at me like ‘who the devil are you.’ Why, I’m her grandson – didn’t you know?

What followed was three of the most regrettably confusing weeks of my life, and I’ll spare you the details. Sex was not involved, thankfully, – or regrettably, depending on your point of view – but the whole thing was an emotional hurricane that left me drained. And Jenn began to pick up on the vibe, too.

“Are you sleeping with her?” she asked me one morning after I’d just walked into her room.

“What? With who?”

“Terry.”

“No.”

And I guess the way the word ‘no’ came out implied an air of finality, because she never brought it up again. And a few weeks after Terry left for Avignon Jennifer moved in with me, in Pop’s house.

Because he’d left it to me. He’d left everything to me, a not insubstantial sum of money. Then Electric Karma’s lawyers told me that as I was the only surviving band member, and there was no one higher up on the food chain in their world, all our royalties were now mine. In perpetuity. In other words, I was filthy rich, and all I’d done was write a few songs and nearly shit my pants in stage-fright a couple of times.

Herb Alpert was, literally, my next door neighbor and I talked him into a tour of the recording studio he’d just finished in his house and I decided then and there I was going to do the same thing, and a few weeks later architects and contractors were finalizing plans while contractors swarmed, then Jenn decided we needed to buy a sailboat.

So we went down to the Newport Boat Show and we looked at one yacht after another…Challengers and NorthStars and DownEast were a few of the names that stood out, but in the end I put money down on a Swan 41, a new Sparkman & Stephens design that had not even been officially launched yet, and wouldn’t, as it turned out, for three more years – which left us without a boat for the foreseeable future.

But there was a new company just starting up in Newport, called Westsail, and they had a 32 at the show that really struck a chord with me – and I bought her, right then and there, and after the show Jenn and I sailed her down to Little Balboa Island, to the dock in front of her father’s house. Pretty soon we were driving down there almost every day, taking Soliloquy out for a sail. We started hopping over to Catalina, dropping our anchor off the casino and snorkeling for so long our skin started to look like mottled white prunes.

Sailing kept me away from the house, and the construction project, but when that work wrapped I went to work on another project. I had all our master tapes delivered to the house and I got to work re-mastering the original cuts, adding some keyboard tracks I’d always wanted, then I took them over to MCA for a listen. They reissued both our albums, and I put together a gratuitous “Best Of Retrospective” just for good measure and before you could say ‘Money in the bank’ I’d banked so much money it was obscene.

So, I had a house in Beverly Hills, at least one sailboat in Newport Beach, more than ten million in banks everywhere from California to the Cayman Islands and a seriously crazy girlfriend who had an affinity for razor blades – and boats.

And with all my work done in the recording studio – it took all of six weeks, too – I was now out of things to do.

Ah, Terry. What about her, you ask?

Well, she had more money than God before she married Pops so that was never an issue, and I was soon reading about a secret marriage to her co-star in this new film, so presto, problem solved.

And within a week I was bored out of my mind.

“What about forming a new group?” Jenn asked.

And all I could see was Deni in that hotel room, telling me that she loved me, and that she always would.

“You know…I don’t think so. I can record an album myself if I really want to. I can play all the instruments, do everything but sing, and if I get the urge I’ll get someone to lay down a vocal track and do the rest on my own.”

She frowned, shook her head. “That’s not the point. Working with musicians on a common goal, that’s what you need right now.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Okay. What do you think about sailing to Hawaii?”

“What? You and me?”

“Yup.”

“That sounds fuckin’ bogus, man!”

Keep in mind, in 1972 ‘bogus’ meant something similar to ‘awesome’ these days. ‘Bogus,’ by the way, replaced ‘bitchin’ in the California lexicon, and ‘bitchin’ was a close cousin of ‘far out’ and ‘groovy.’ We clear now, Dude?

I had a million questions, the first being ‘could we do the trip on Soliloquy?’

“Fuck, yes. She was made for this kind of trip.”

“Oh?” Keep in mind about all I knew concerning sailboat was that the pointy end was supposed to go forward. Next, consider that Soliloquy had two pointy ends, so I was already confused.

“Yeah, we could hit Hawaii, then head south for Tahiti.”

“Tahiti?”

I’d heard of Tahiti. Once. I think.

“Sure. What do you think? Wanna try it?”

So, my suicidal girlfriend wanted to get me on a 32 foot long sailboat a thousand miles from the nearest land. To what end, I wondered?

“How long would it take to get to Hawaii?” I wanted to know.

“Depending on the wind, two to three weeks.”

“Weeks? Not months?”

“Yachts sailing in the Transpac Race do it in eight days. It’s not that big a deal.”

“Have you done it?”

“Twice.”

“Of course.”

“But this would be just you and me, no pressure. We could really get to know one another, I guess.”

“When?”

“Best time is June and July.”

“So…a month or so from now?”

“Yup.”

“Would you like to do this?”

“More than anything in the world.”

“Well, maybe we’d better get to work. My guess is Soliloquy isn’t geared up for this kind of thing.”

She looked at me and grinned. “I already have.”

“Ah.”

And so the worm turned.

+++++

I never considered myself a sailor. Never, as in ‘not once.’ I’d never been on a sailboat until the day my shrink invited me out on her husband’s J-boat, the day I met Jennifer, and yet I was hooked from that first day on. If you’ve ever looked at an eagle or a seagull and wondered what it’s like to bank free and easy on a breeze, well, sailing’s about as close as you’ll get in this life – and unless you happen to believe in reincarnation and hope to wind up as a bird in your next, that’s the end of that. Bottom line: after that day I began to consider myself a sailor – and I know that sounds ridiculous – until you consider sailing is a state of mind, not simple experience.

At that point sailing was, for me, heading out the Newport jetty around ten in the morning and dropping the anchor off Avalon 5-6 hours later. Soliloquy was a heavily built, very sound little ship and weather was never a factor; in forty knots with six to ten foot seas she just powered through the channel with kind of a ‘ho-hum’ feel, like – you’ll need to throw some heavier shit my way to make me work. She was confident feeling in bad weather, something I came to appreciate later that summer, but something I was, generally speaking, clueless about those first few months sailing with Jenn.

No GPS back in the day, too. Navigation was old school, and I bought a Plath sextant, a German made beauty, and Jenn taught me to use it so we shared navigation duties. I’d always been strong in math, and I guess that’s what carried me through music into composition, so sight reduction tables and the spherical trigonometry involved in celestial navigation wasn’t a stretch. Still, the first time we motored from Avalon to Newport in a pea-soup fog – and nailed it – I was proud of Jenn for being such an accomplished navigator – and teacher.

Anyway, we stocked the boat with provisions, including everything we’d need to bake bread at sea, and a few other necessities, like a life raft and a shitload of rum – because sailors only drink rum, right? – and I went to my favorite guitar dealer in Hollywood and picked up an small backpackers guitar, an acoustic beauty made in Vermont, and we were good to go.

We left Newport on the first of June, 1972, and we sailed to Avalon and baked bread that evening, and when the sun came up the next morning we pulled in the anchor and stowed it aft, then, once we cleared the southeast end of Catalina, we set a course of 260 degrees and settled in for the duration. Call it twenty-five hundred miles at an average of 125 miles per day, and though we racked off 150 most days, we had a few under a hundred, too. The stove and oven were propane, most lighting came from oil lamps, and we had an icebox – not refrigeration – so we went about a week with things like fresh meat and milk then switched over to canned goods and Parmalat milk for the next two. And the thing is, I found I just didn’t care. We figured out how to make things we liked using the things we had on hand, and we made rice and homemade curries that were something else – then you had to factor in the sunsets out there…a million miles from nowhere. Sitting in the cockpit with the aroma of freshly baked yeast bread coming out of the galley, and I played something new on the guitar while the sky went from yellow to orange to purple…well…yeah, it was magic.

One day the seas went flat, turned to an endless mirror, and the only things we saw all day were the fins of an occasional blue shark or United DC-8s overhead on their way to or from Honolulu, and I’d never felt so utterly at peace in all my life. We’d bought what we’d need to rig a cockpit awning so we did that day, if only to keep from being roasted alive under the sun, and I think we started in on each other by mid-morning, and kept at it through sunset. Like, literally, nonstop sex – for fifteen hours – and it was one of the most surreal days I’d ever experienced. Pure sex, cut off from everything else – not-one-other-distraction. Just intent, focused physicality.

I didn’t know Jennifer, not really, not before those hours, and I’m not sure she knew herself all that well, either, but we never looked at one another the same way after that. We were reduced to pure soul out there, not one false, pretentious emotion guided us. Soliloquy was hanging in that water, no wind stirred the sea and we’d drop a cedar bucket into the crystalline water and wash ourselves down from time to time, but other than that the day melted away – leaving pure love in it’s wake.

And that night the wind picked up, our speed too, then the wind really started blowing, the seas building and we sailed for three days under a double-reefed main and staysail, the steering handled by the Monitor wind-vane self-steering rig Jenn had installed by the factory. And still Soliloquy just powered through the seas, never once did we doubt her ability to carry us safely onward.

And a few windy days later the trip was over.

Jenn’s father had shown up a few days before our expected arrival and he’d secured a berth at Kewalo Basin, near the city center, and it turned out he was as excited as we were about the trip. The fact that it had turned out so peculiarly uneventful was icing on the cake…and because I think he had it fixed firmly in mind that the crossing would be something like making it to the summit of Everest he’d never considered making such a trip. Now he was on fire to do it, and was itching to make the trip back to California.

I wasn’t, however, not with him, and not on a 32 foot sailboat.

Yet Jennifer was. She thought it would be a good time for she and her father to mend some fences, and wanted me to come along.

And again, I didn’t want to be a part of that whole thing, and I let her know it in no uncertain terms. So, she told me to fly back, that she and her father would bring Soliloquy home to Newport.

Fine, says I, and I exit, stage right, on one of those United DC-8s we’d watched arcing across the sky. The thing is, there’s no easy way back from Hawaii to Southern California. Wind and currents make it much more doable if you arc north towards British Columbia, and then ride the current south past the Golden Gate to LA. It’s a much longer trip, and it takes a lot longer – as long as 4-5 weeks. Another drawback? You have to go much farther north, well into colder, arctic influenced waters where both storms and fog are the routine, so the trip is tough. More like the Everest expedition Jenn’s father didn’t want to experience, as a matter of fact.

So, a few days later I packed a bag and went to the airport. By myself. I flew to LA and took a taxi home, and like that it was over. The trip, our sudden affinity for each other – over and done with, like the whole thing had been a dream. Or a nightmare. It was like this thing she had going on with her father was a toxic, manic depressive beast where she had to convince herself she had to put things right, and fixing that busted relationship was a much higher priority that her relationship with me.

Jerry Garcia wanted me to help out on an album so I flew up north a few days after I got back, and we worked in the studio for almost a month, and by the time I left I had it in my head to do a solo album. Those sunsets came back to me then, playing that little backpackers guitar while Jenn baked bread down below, that sun-baked idyll, the buckets of seawater. I spent two weeks down in my basement studio laying down the tracks for just one song, and when I finished I carried it down to MCA and everyone who listened to it said it was the best thing I’d ever done. Could I carry through, create an album out of the experience?

Hell yes, I said.

And when I got home there was a message on my machine, from Jenn, in Victoria, on Vancouver Island. She and her did had had a gigantic falling out and he’d left her there; could I call her at the marina?

I called the number she left on the machine and some dockmaster ran down to Soliloquy to fetch her while my fingers drummed away on the kitchen counter, and when she finally got to the phone she was in breathless and in tears.

The whole trip had been a nightmare, she sobbed.

Was I surprised? No. As in, Hell No.

And when would she learn? How many more times would she let that mean-spirited asshole tear her apart. How many times would she run home and start the whole process all over again? What was I missing?

“What do you want, Jenn?”

“Could you fly up, help me bring Soliloquy back to LA?”

“Then what?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. What happens next?”

“We get on with our life. Together.”

“Really? Until the next time you need to run home to Daddy?”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe you two were meant for each other. Maybe I’m just getting in the way, ya know?”

“Aaron…no. It’s not that way and you know it.”

“All I know is what I see.”

“Is that what you see?”

“Yes.”

She hung up on me.

The dockmaster called me at six the next morning. Jenn had found some razor blades.

+++++

I was up there by late morning, and her psychiatrists at the hospital were convinced this attempt had been a classic ‘cry for help,’ that her cuts hadn’t been deep enough to damage the tendons. But there was another complicating factor.

Yup. Pregnant. Timing worked out about right, too. Our sunbaked idyll had been more than productive musically. And now she wanted to abort the fetus. There was no point, she’d told her docs. She’d destroyed all her chances for happiness, just like she always did, so why bring a kid into that world? Why not just kill everything about us? Take care of business once and for all time.

Maybe I was beyond caring that day, but it was beginning to feel like she was using suicide as a weapon to hurt everyone around her. Me, certainly, but her mother and father, too, and now she was going to carry to the next logical step, in her world, anyway. Kill the truly blameless, and I was stunned. Too stunned for words.

When I went in to see her I told her as much, too. Kill that kid and she’d never see me again. Simple as that. I left the hospital and went down to the marina, listed the sailboat with a broker and flew back to LA that evening.

Yup. Cold. Heartless. And tired of going round and round on her psychotic merry-go-round.

Her docs called me two days later and said she’d opted to have the abortion. It was done.

And so was I.

With her, anyway.

Not with sailing, as it turned out. Not by a long shot.

There were a couple of guys down in Costa Mesa working on a new 38 footer, and I drove down to see them, and the boat they were working on. They called it the Alajuela, named after a city in Costa Rica, and work was well underway on their second hull when I showed up on their doorstep. By the time I left later that afternoon I’d bought the next available boat, and would have her in a little less than a year, so I went home and retreated to the studio.

Jenn, of course, started calling as soon as she got back to Newport.

I, of course, changed my number.

She started coming up to the house.

I asked her to leave, and never return. After the third return I called a lawyer, had him serve her with a restraining order – and out came the razor blades. I heard that anecdotally, of course. Her father didn’t call me. He called my lawyer, who told me. Another near miss, of course, but this time they put her away for a couple of years and in the end I didn’t see her for almost ten years.

She made her way into my music, however. The love I felt that day for her was as real as it ever was, and that was hard to reconcile. As hard as it was to reconcile the kid she so carelessly killed.

+++++

I wrapped up the album about a month before Troubadour launched, and the studio had released Idyll as a single a few months before. Well received, too, but not like Electric Karma’s albums, so when the new album shot up the charts two weeks after release I was as surprised as I was happy.

But I wasn’t into it anymore. I had moved on, was already planning for a life with Troubadour. Everything about her was planned for one thing, and one thing only. I was going to take her around the world, and I’d probably be going solo, too.

Refrigeration was built in, roller furling headsails too. A more robust self-steering vane was a must, and light air sails a must. I wanted teak decks again, and they relented, laid them for me, and by the time Troubadour hit Newport harbor she was mine, purpose built and ready to roll. I moved her to a friend’s slip at the Balboa Bay Club and fitted her out, packed her to the gills – in less than a week, then I went home for a few days – to say goodbye.

I decided to rent Pop’s house to a friend of mine, a musician, and in the end left the house in the care of my lawyer. I drove down to Newport, handed my car over to the guys at the boatyard and in the middle a foggy March night I cast off her lines and slipped out the jetty, pointed her bow to the southwest – bound for the Marquesas.

	Stephan on The Dividing Line, Point …
	Stephan on The Dividing Line, Point …
	adrianleverkuhnwrite… on The Dividing Line, Point …
	Stephan on The Dividing Line, Point …
	Stephan on The Otter and The Owl

Adrian Leverkühn Writes

Stories, thoughts about music and movies, politics and world events…

Category Archives: sailing

OutBound (WIP conclusion)

OutBound (second fragment)

OutBound (WIP/fragment 17 April ’17)