Читать книгу Original Love - J.J. Murray - Страница 9

I drift along with the tide of cars escaping New York City, Walt Whitman’s “city of spires and masts,” letting the convoy of tattered flags and red, white, and blue bumper stickers carry me through the wasteland of Long Island, the supposed recreation area for the people of New York City, home to several million commuters and the infamous Long Island Rail Road. I float east with flocks of other idle dreamers and screamers clinging to steering wheels on the Northern State Parkway around lunchtime. From Massepequa to Montauk, where the Amistad landed only to be escorted to Connecticut, Long Island is the melting pot cooked down to the dregs.

Suffolk County: nothing but potato farms, ducks, and Grumman.

I hesitate when I see a sign to Huntington. I don’t want to go there yet. One ghost story at a time.

I waver again when I see an advertisement for Levittown, one of the places the Captain used to live before Levittown became marginally integrated. I don’t ever want to go there. I like homogenized milk; I don’t like homogenized neighborhoods. Maybe the melting pot went to Levittown to die. And all during junior high, Levittown was the only Long Island town listed on the big Cram map on the wall in geography class, the rest of Long Island obliterated by the letters of New Haven, Bridgeport, and Stamford, Connecticut.

Heading south to Plainedge, then east, I read signs announcing so many towns, so many names like Wyandanch, West Babylon, and Bohemia. Native American names coexist with biblical names east of Hedonism on this thin sliver of the American dream jutting out into the Atlantic. What the Dutch took from the natives then shared with the English is now one large faceless neighborhood divided by malls, restaurants, convenience stores, and the empty shadows of industrial parks.

Huntington’s main mall is the Walt Whitman Mall. What would Walt say as he walked around inside his own mall? Would he say, “I am large, I contain multitudes”? Could he bloom at Bloomingdale’s or contemplate leaves of grass at Garden Botanika? Would he echo the sufferings of men like me who don’t like to shop and say, “I am the man, I suffered, I was there” or “I stop somewhere waiting for you”? Would Walt “invite his soul” to observe the indoor sidewalk sales? Would Walt feel connected to all the atoms in the houses in planned neighborhoods on Long Island that look the same, two cars in every garage, a single tree in every yard? A couplet takes shape as I drive:

Welcome to a dark, suburban Hades,

where houses run into the 180’s…

I slip through the redundant Islips (West Islip, Islip proper, and East Islip), past Great River to Sayville, heading to River Road and the Charon Ferry Service for the trip across Great South Bay to Cherry Grove. That’s one of the many nice things about Fire Island: no cars allowed, only your own two feet or a bicycle to get you around. I park the Nova, grab my carry-on and laptop, and stroll to the docks, the scent of diesel fuel and salt air tingling my nose. Great South Bay, while not exactly a quagmire of whirlpools, has been known to belch sand onto the rest of Long Island.

Because the next ferry to Fire Island won’t leave until 2 P.M., I have half an hour to waste counting rows of red Radio Flyer wagons and analyzing the other passengers in a poem on the back of the car rental receipt:

A young man, hacking into a handkerchief,

leans against an older man who winces at every cough.

Another, dressed in black, sits by himself on the dock,

his feet splayed over the rainbow-colored water

while a man in red holds on to a piling for dear life.

Two crew-cut blond women work an old snack machine,

yanking and cursing at each knob,

while an older woman wrapped in a blue coat nods off on a bench,

her breathing as exhausted as her makeup.

An old song creeps into my head,

something about not paying the ferryman,

and I find myself humming “Come Sail Away,”

an even older song by Styx.

The other people waiting seem like fallen leaves in the chilly air,

like birds that flock to land, stretching arms out toward the bay.

We are all helpless souls of the unburied,

fluttering around these docks,

so many bones in New York not yet laid to rest.

God, my poetry is as depressed as I am.

After buying a honey bun that I know has been aging gracelessly in the machine since August, I read the ferry regulations, the print looking fresh on a wall covered with old nautical charts and faded boating notices:

In order to comply with United States Coast Guard regulations, the following baggage and freight procedures must be followed:

Two (2) pieces of hand luggage is allowed, no charge. A Tariff will be imposed on all additional items. Shopping Carts & Luggage carriers—Min. charge $3.00. Luggage only is allowed in passenger areas. Loaded wagons (e.g., Radio Flyers) will not be accepted. Absolutely no bungee cords can be used. Freight must be handled on and off the ferry by crew.

Due to quantity, size and weight of freight, limited space on board, weather conditions, loading and unloading time, and the safety and convenience of the passengers, the crew at times will limit the amount of freight carried on a trip.

I don’t have much baggage (visible anyway), and I look at the few others waiting around me. A couple of briefcases and a few handbags. Our own thoughts will echo on this ferry. The last item—Smoking is not allowed on the docks or the ferry—makes me laugh, because as the ferry approaches, I see the captain in the fly bridge of the approaching ferry puffing a big cigar.

After the crew tethers the burnt-orange ferry to the dock, the captain walks down the gangplank followed by a small group of people. Those waiting around me fade away like autumn shade, and I’m the only one left to take the next ferry.

“I got a lot of freight to load,” the captain says to me, “so you might wanna reconsider what you’re bringing cuz we may have to shoehorn you in or find you a smaller boat to get across the marsh.”

I look again at the laptop and carry-on. “I only have these.”

He taps the laptop bag. “No bombs, knives, or box cutters in there, right?”

“None.”

The captain, a strong, detestably smelling old man with bloodred eyes and sweat-stained clothing, bellows orders to his crew as they herd crates and boxes into the boat. His hairy ears, bushy eyebrows, and thick gray goatee make him look every bit like a demon. I almost wish I had a penny to give him for the half thoughts in his jowly head. Better to keep my penny and my own thoughts under my tongue.

Half an hour of stuffing and cramming later, a crew member searches my bag while I stand still. “Nine bucks,” he says.

Waterway robbery, I think, but I pay him and drag my feet up the gangplank, mainly because I don’t really want to go to Cherry Grove, where I’m sure to stick out like a sore heterosexual.

The captain tells me how lucky I am. “Normally I wouldn’t let you on, as full as we are,” he tells me. “Got just enough room for you. Otherwise you’d have to wait for my next run.”

I walk into the passenger area and take my seat in front of plexiglas windows filmed with salt. I guess if I had tipped the crew member an extra five I might have actually gotten a clear view of the bay. Upon inspection, the windows seem to have a mazelike pattern on them, like a labyrinth leading to a blackened glob of bird droppings.

Story of my life.

The trip is uneventful, the stagnant, shadowy water of Great South Bay no more than ten to twelve feet deep, the boat groaning with its heavy load. It’s not exactly an ancient Greek adventure, and I hardly feel like an ancient hero anyway, a stale honey bun my only sustenance, a void in my head where a romantic comedy is supposed to be.

And there’s really nothing funny about Great South Bay, the scene of one of the worst hurricanes of the twentieth century. It was so bad back in 1938 that they didn’t even have time to name the hurricane. The Captain was only thirteen and living in Montauk at the time.

“There wasn’t any warning,” he told me once while we were caulking the longest seam in the wooden hull of the Argo. He called the entire awful job “paying the devil,” because we had to squat in the bilges for hours. Hence the title of my second book.

“Nothing on the radio, Captain?” I was the only kid I’ve ever known who was not allowed to call his own father “Dad.” But it wasn’t so bad, and it seemed fitting on the Argo, where the Captain’s word was law.

“Nope. I remember it was a Wednesday. Your grandpa was out with the other bay men dredging, while I was paying the devil on Old Man Mudge’s dredge. I’d come up for air every now and then because we used hot tar on the devil back then, and I saw the gulls acting funny on the shore.”

“Funny?”

“Like they were in a hot pan about to be cooked, jumping around like popcorn frying.”

To this day, I check out birds when a storm is forecast. If they start “popping” off the ground, I find shelter in a hurry.

“We had just had two weeks of rain, so the ground was soft. Gray skies as usual, seas not as heavy as the day before, wind from the north at first, then about noon it shifted to the east, and it started to rain to beat the band.”

“Like a nor’easter.”

“Yep. Only this nor’easter was tearing off roofs and popping power and phone lines left and right. I left that dredge in a hurry once it started rocking and rolling, and I immediately lost my way the rain was so thick, the wind whipping up to seventy knots.”

“What did you do, Captain?”

“At times I could see through that wall of rain, and what I saw…The sea was completely white, the air filled with sea foam, waves fifty feet and higher, fallen trees, dredges up on land, rolls of waves tearing past docks on their way in, sweeping those docks away on their way out. I headed up to the town to higher ground and rode that storm out for five hours in a hardware store. Lots of metal to dodge in a hardware store, let me tell you.

“The storm ended by six, skies were completely clear by ten, but since we didn’t have any power, we didn’t know how bad it was till the next day.” He had paused and closed his eyes.

“It was bad, huh.”

“Worse. Most of the houses were damaged almost beyond repair, and your grandpa’s house ended up with five other houses in the pond. Must have been a hundred boats destroyed, some thirty of them blown a hundred yards inland. Dragnets, fish traps—gone. Your grandpa’s two boats—gone. The oysters and clams—gone. The sea just up and covered them with a million tons of sand. Wiped your grandpa and the other bay men completely out…”

Grandpa lost his boats and his livelihood that day and later lost his mind from the grief—and the whiskey—leaving my father homeless at thirteen. And yet my father never cursed the sea that changed his life forever. He instead served in the U.S. Navy and sailed Long Island Sound every weekend of my life, even though he had lost most of the sight in his right eye by 1986. He could never get enough of the sea, even if he couldn’t see it. “There’s much to be learned from the sea,” he’d tell me. “When you’re sailing the blood of a giant, you never know which way he’ll bleed.”

And now we’re in the same boat, I think to myself as the ferry docks near green-gray weeds swaying along the slimy shore of Fire Island. I’ve got no home, no real livelihood, no father, no one even to call me anything.

I take Bayview Walk past some fantastic white multi-windowed houses facing Great South Bay, all of them built low to the ground as if they, too, are crouching on the shore in fear of a storm. Enveloped in the lonely half light, trees leaning over courtyards to provide pockets of shade, I pass through the empty streets of Cherry Grove until I reach Green Walk, where I nearly collide with a blond woman walking three dogs, each more hideous than the one before: a black-and-brown bull mastiff, its jowls dripping, its breath pestilential; a white toy poodle, coiffed like a diva and yipping like one, too, its tail a white microphone high in the air; and a Basset hound, its eyes huge and weepy, its head as big as the rest of its body, only its thumping tail longer. Their leashes tangle around my legs as the mastiff searches my coat pockets for the honey bun.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the woman says, pulling back only the poodle and Basset hound. The mastiff works its nose deeper into my left pocket. “Regina must smell food.”

No kidding. I ease Regina’s nose out of my pocket and withdraw the slippery carcass of my honey bun, peeling back the plastic and offering it to Regina. A millisecond later, the honey bun is gone, plastic and all. I count four fingers and a thumb and smile.

“Regina’s really a sweet dog.”

Right. “Maybe you can help me. I’m looking for Henry Milton’s place on Green Walk.”

She points to a gate across the street. “That’s Henry’s place. Are you a new friend of his?”

I extend a Regina-spittled hand. “Uh, yeah, I guess. I’m one of his writers, Peter Underhill.”

She leaves my hand hanging, lifting the leashes by way of explanation. I wouldn’t have shaken my hand either. “I’m Sibyl, dog-walker extraordinaire.”

“Nice to meet you, Sibyl.” Regina growls. I bet the plastic didn’t go down too well. Regina will be blowing bubbles out her ass later. “And you, too, Regina.”

“See you around,” Sibyl says as she breezes away, her blond hair bouncing in the wind.

I open the gate and find myself in a sunny courtyard with surprisingly green grass and a grove of laurels, whitewashed benches and outdoor couches spaced here and there around a small, empty in-ground pool. I hear a voice singing to a guitar and smell the oregano beginnings of an Italian or Greek feast. As I shut the gate, the wind dies down, and some amber accent lights begin to glow along the path. I’m almost to some stairs when I notice a man watching me from the roof high above.

“What are you—prophet, priest, or inventor?” he asks, his voice rising and falling like a seasoned poet. I count the syllables in my head—ten exactly. This must be the poet Henry was telling me about.

“Writer,” I call up to him.

He rolls his eyes. “You must be one of Henry’s many friends.”

I move up the stairs, smiling at him while once again counting his syllables. Ten again. Normal people do not speak in blank verse.

At the top, I find myself on a patio with a brilliant view of Great South Bay. “You must be a poet,” I tell him. “Do you always speak in blank verse?”

“Alas, it is one of the dying arts,” he says. He wears a white headband, loose green sweatpants, and an oversized white New York Jets jersey. He is also as tan as burnt toast, lines of white skin leaking out in squint lines around his eyes. “Welcome, Henry’s friend, to Elysium.”

“Peter Underhill.”

He nods. “You can call me the Poet, Coleman Muse.”

“Nice to meet you, Coleman.”

“Let me give you a tour of Cherry Grove,” he says, still speaking in blank verse. Coleman must be no fun at parties. “Over there’s where people drink to forget.” I see a pub or bar named Le Lethe. “Yonder lies the Great South Bay, shimmering.”

“Do you live here year-round?”

“No, because none of us has a fixed home.”

He’s good at making up blank verse, but this is getting creepy. I look to the south and see the waves of the Atlantic tapping the shore. “How’s the weather been?”

Coleman pauses a beat, probably to count his syllables. “Calm, cool, and serene, and Cherry Grove sleeps.”

Spooky, strange, and weird is this Coleman Muse. Geez, now I’m thinking in blank verse. “Uh, where’s Henry’s place?”

“I will show you if you will follow me.”

I don’t speak to Coleman on the way to Henry’s door for fear of another ten-syllable blast. I wonder if there’s therapy available for recovering blank verse addicts. He stops in front of a white door facing Great South Bay. “This, Henry’s friend, is Henry’s bright white door, and if you like we can parley some more.”

Now he’s speaking in couplets. I thank him, open the door, and see—Geez, I have died and gone to a blizzard in Alaska.

Henry’s studio apartment is bright white and all the same eye-blinding bright white. Henry could have had the decency to at least do his moldings and baseboards in antique white. I might get lost in here! White indoor-outdoor carpet. I didn’t know they made such an irrational thing. A white sofa, a white coffee table in front, a white library table behind. White curtains and shades, pulled down, of course, to keep all the other colors safely outside. A white bookcase filled with white seashells and unpainted Hummel figurines. A framed copy of the Beatles’ White Album. How tacky. A white dinner table with two matching wing chairs. A white kitchen counter and appliances, cabinets filled with opaque white glasses and fine china, drawers filled with white utensils.

I rip open the refrigerator and—Here’s some color. Lots of beer, soda, condiments, salad fixings. His pantry has color, too, each shelf covered meticulously with white contact paper and teeming with boxed goodies of every flavor of the rainbow. I search through the house for anything else visibly nonwhite and come up empty. Even Henry’s soap, soap dish, and shower fixtures are white.

I have entered a rubber room on the funny farm. I am in a snowstorm in Buffalo. I am buried under the surface of the moon. I will have to leave all the windows and the refrigerator and pantry doors open at all times or I will go blind. I cannot be Ebony Mills in a completely Caucasian apartment.

After moving the dinner table to a window looking out on Great South Bay, I set up shop. I boot up the laptop, which is gloriously black with glowing green lights, then litter the table with stacks of research notes and outlines. I make a cup of dark brown Earl Grey tea, using brown sugar to sweeten it. I slide Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life into the laptop’s CD tray, “Love’s in Need of a Love Today” breaking the silence. I am tired, but I am ready to write. I look at my working outline for Chapter 1 of my novel:

 I. Back story: history of the Underhills

 II. Back story: David and “Hel” Underhill

 III. Back story: 1963–1975 (life with the Captain and “Hel”)

I sift through my notes on my family history, my fingers eager to begin my dissection of the hallowed Underhills, but nothing comes.

Nothing.

I start on the back story for my father three times, but I fail to grasp his essence, his character, typing then deleting “The Captain was a” three times.

Maybe it’s the light salt breezes blowing off the bay that I’m allowing inside to spoil Henry’s antiseptic apartment, maybe it’s the long day with the flight, the drive, and the ferry ride, maybe it’s me singing along with Stevie Wonder instead of writing, maybe it’s the fact that Henry’s apartment is one huge blank page haunted by a blank verse poet doing iambic pentameter jumping jacks on the roof above—

I can’t write tonight. I can’t latch on to any of the winged dreams and nightmares swooping through my mind. Edie, who had a classical private school education, used to call me the Fisher King whenever I had writer’s block. “You’re as impotent as the Fisher King,” she’d tell me. “But I guard the Holy Grail,” I’d reply.

I am the Fisher King. Again. It seems fitting here as I look out over the calm waters of Great South Bay.

But when I curl up on the couch and think of Ebony and how fine she would look in Henry’s apartment, how her dark skin would blaze shadows on to these too-white walls, I smile.

Good night, Ebony, wherever you are. I’ll write about you tomorrow.

Promise.