Category: Women Publisher: Persistence Press Inc.
ISBN-10: 0983991812
Type: Fiction
Pages: 358
Copyright: Sep 2, 2011
ISBN-13: 9780983991816
Love, loss, and redemption in the warm waters off Fort Lauderdale, the yachting capital of the world.
Life, love, loss, and redemption.
She is in a loveless marriage, a dead-end job. She is having an affair with the friend of a friend—
He has lost his wife. He needs is a little time.
The other woman has her friends, her house, her job, her husband, and her lover—-of course, things would change if she knew what the others were up to.
There is a place by the beach, a place of yachts and sun and warm ocean water, a place of beauty and sin and sadness and humor and grit. This place calls these people to it, like a bright light calls wayward ships home across a vast, tossing sea.
Will they find harbor or will they wreck on the shoreline?
Excerpt
Contents
Part One: A Gathering of Winds
Gail—Oakland Park Beach
Fort Lauderdale 1
Jude—La Hacienda Serena
Sandy Jo—The Marina Office
Tom—Plantation, West of Fort Lauderdale
Carmine—Oakland Park Beach
Hardtack—The North Basin
Jude and A-dock—The South Basin
Jude and Danie—The Amphitrite
Captain Geoff—The Marina Office
Fort Lauderdale 2
Sandy Jo and Geoff—The Knockers UP!
Gail and Phil—The Marina Office
Part Two: A False End to the Low Season
Sandy Jo and Brad—Davie
Gail and Geoff—The Pier
Carmine and Gail—Hollywood and on the Bridge
Carmine and Gail—Oakland Park Beach 1
Gail and Rebecca—The Marina Office
Almost Everyone—A-dock
Gail and Jude—The Hospital and Chuck’s
Sandy Jo, Gail, and Puller—The Marina Office
Carmine and Doctor Rosen—Boca Raton
Part Three: Storms
Fort Lauderdale 3
Sandy Jo and Geoff—The Pier
Carmine and Gail—Oakland Park Beach 2
Jude and Puller—A-dock
Gail and Jude—The Amphitrite
The Tarriers and the HARD DRIVE—Davie
Jude and Gail—La Hacienda Serena
Friends and Sports—The Start of the Trip
Voices in the Eye—Fort Lauderdale
Eight Seconds—The Amphitrite
The Coverage—Fort Lauderdale
Fort Lauderdale Final
Part Four: Dying Winds
Epilogue
About the Author
~~~~
Part One: A Gathering of Winds
In the warm places that surround the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, hurricanes come ashore between the months of June and November, mostly. Great storms can, and do, spring up, of course, all year round. Through all the seasons, a blank, rote sun keeps the sea as lukewarm and torpid as a used bath, and a tic of wind or current can torque up on itself at any time, like a grass eel nicked on the barbs of a gig, and come at all the people inland in a blind, screaming rage.
Absent those squalls and cyclonic fits though, the breeze purls shoreward, sylph and desultory, and in the southern reaches of Florida, the people of a summer season whose only evidence of an end is its calendar pages dropping off the wall grind away at their lives wrapped in a wet, ever-pressing heat. They grumble at the sun without looking at it, because it is always there, they know, and they scuttle out from under it whenever they can, ducking into the cool of their indoor hovels like bugs waiting for the night.
In particular, those who work the coaming of the ocean hope—without praying aloud, ‘else to call down the jinx on themselves—that what storms may come miss them wholly, and that God cast his angry scowls away north or west, and that He spend his anger out in a foreign, colder, empty, and green-blue sea.
~~~~
Gail—Oakland Park Beach
It was exactly 4.2 miles due south to her customary parking spot at work. She checked her watch as she schlepped from the elevator into the humming dank of the high-rise condominium’s garage. On a good day, allowing for every traffic light, every swerve around every cell-phone-distracted lane-changer, spandex-shorted bicycling workout showoff, and dog-walking piece of geriatric crust en route, she could make it to the employee spaces at the ‘Serena in around nine minutes. Nine minutes from car-start to purse-drop on the desk behind the customer service counter in the marina.
Of course, nine minutes became almost thirty if she had to pull over to be sick. She didn’t feel as though a lean-out-and-heave pit stop was too likely this morning, but one never knew.
She pressed the button on her keychain and her car chirped its hello. The sound did not come from quite the direction she had been heading across the expanse of the garage, but it was close. Close enough.
When she reached her little coupe, she opened the door and settled herself into the driver’s seat. As she stretched out to close the door, something stabbed at her shoulder. It felt like a nail stuck into the joint.
What the hell did I do now?
She gauged the extent of her newest nuisance twinge, rubbing it absently and running a quick sensory inventory of the rest of her body. She had absolutely no recollection of how she might have hurt herself. It would be hours before the buzzing fog in her head lifted enough to allow an exploration of the possibilities, much less the divination of an explanation. If she still hurt by lunchtime, she’d attempt to piece together some reasonable semblance of events and personalities just for the sake of her personal peace of mind. It might also help to have an excuse at the ready if Carmine happened to notice and ask about it later.
Otherwise, she would just forget it amid all the other crumpled trash strewn about the floor of her life.
The solid wunk of the car door was followed by the sudden still of the interior as it cut the hum of the garage’s huge ventilator fans. That first abrupt quiet of the day was like a punctuation mark on whatever had happened last night. She sat with her eyes closed for a second in the stillness, marshalling her reserves.
Then she sighed and moved forward in her seat to turn the key to start the engine.
“We’ve made it this far, might as well—whatever.”
‘Helluva mantra, girl, she thought.
She checked her watch. 6:28 a.m.
Rebecca, of course, preferred that the opening front desk agent appear—smiling and bubbling with morning cheer, no less—to greet the guys from A-dock and the earliest rising guests no later than 6:30, even though officially, no one on staff was scheduled to punch in before 7.
Rebecca herself rarely appeared in the office before 9:30, and Gail and everyone else knew that all too well. Furthermore, most mornings, upon her eventual arrival, Queen Becky would slink sideways into the cubbyhole of her office, swing the door closed behind her, and nurse herself through her own morning’s worth of après-clubbing comeuppance, not to be disturbed.
So, yeah, Rebecca prefers a lot of things.
The fact was, Rebecca Elizabeth Janus was in high school when Gail had taken over early duty, unlocking the office doors and starting up the urns of complimentary coffee for the gaggle of marina early-morning colorfuls. As long as the phones got picked up starting around 7 o’clock, everything was just fine.
She can stuff her 6:30 up her—
She unzipped a small pocket in the folds of her Coach® bag and began rummaging. As always, this morning’s operative mood would be brought to the good people of Gail Greggio’s world courtesy of the color blue, or maybe pink, or maybe—let’s see, was it a two-tone kind of day? Could we interest Madam in something with a timed-release, tolerance-inducing kick perhaps? What blessed salve might the personal dispensary offer up today? She sighed as she surveyed the pharmaceutical confetti.
A voice inside her head scolded, This is bad, Gail, honey. Bad.
And then—
Let’s wait until after we clear the station this morning before we have that little talk with ourselves about getting off this train, okay? Let’s just do that first.
She rummaged through the hydrocodones, oxy-somethings, the loose over-the-counter imitations of real meds, and the linty mystery party-starters from friends and outings past. In addition to the new shoulder zinger, the hit parade of justification for this morning’s prescription included a left ankle bruise, a speck of mascara left over from yesterday afternoon’s prep work that was slowly insisting itself against the sclera of her left eyeball—oh, and cramps, thank you very much.
Well, at least the arrival of her monthly visitor meant she wasn’t preg—
Ah! Norco®. There is a God, and thank you, Doctor. This little southern girl might make a go of it after all.
She swallowed the pills dry, willing them down through the dry tunnel of her throat.
Rest. Settle. Breathe. She sat still for another second to let the vibrations from the car work up through the floor and seat into her body.
Adjust AC vents to keep fresh air flowing over the face. Choose music track.
No. Nah. Jesus, no—there.
Dancin’ days are indeed here again, Mister Plant and Mister Page, and we thank you for pointing that out. ‘Turns out they’re here again almost every morning around this time.
Set volume. Nice.
Now, mirror check. Shades squarely in place over the mascara mayhem and bright red rims of those famous, smiling greenies. Rest again. Ignore shoulder. Ignore ankle. Ignore eyeball. The woman’s eyes in the rectangle of the rearview ask her a stern question.
Do we really want to do this?
The answer is, “Do we have to ask?”
Shift into reverse and begin with a rapid, three-point back-out into the day.
To herself, as she did every morning as she started out for work, Gail mused, “There’s something prophetic about starting one’s workday ass-first.”
She headed out on to Route A1A, south through the canyon of the hi-rise condos and apartments, worn-out strip malls, and convenience mart/filling stations that littered the landscape all along her way to work.
She checked her watch—6:31; earlier than anybody who didn’t live at or work along the beach ever, ever got up, unless they were sneaking out from under the sheets and slinking home.
She pulled her smile into a small, thin line. Ah, the walk of shame. Memories. Not from last night, of course. Her recollections of what she did or did not do during the course of last evening’s reveries were shrouded in a bleary haze right now, still a day or so out from coalescence, at best. People she’d run into or spoken with and places she and the group had tottered into and burst out of were more like shadows and echoes of a different time and place to her right now, someplace else entirely.
She allowed the music from the radio to sink in together with the thrum of the car engine and join the numbed buzz in her head.
No, the memories coming back to her now were of a time further back, a space of time and place when a much younger woman would often awake to find herself in strange and disheveled circumstances, and have to gather what underthings and personals she could find and slink on home before her husband came to.
Her calling back the wild nature of those experiences were what made her smile. The scant differences between the young girl in those psychedelic dreams and the hungover woman now pulling her obedient little car out onto the early morning street were what made that smile strained and tinged with something dark.
Anyway, start the clock. She checked northward for oncoming, and pressed her foot onto the accelerator, bumping on to the wide boulevard as she passed the boundary between her condo property and the rest of the world.
Nine minutes of peace. Nine minutes not to think, not to feel, not to be here. Okay, maybe the last three of the nine to focus, to bear down just a touch, let the Norco® take hold.
Her car zipped out into the wash of sunrise light at Northeast 18th Street, just north of Hugh Taylor Birch State Park. She crossed the imaginary border between what passed for a neighborhood in Fort Lauderdale and the only stretch of beach with access not impinged upon by residential or commercial properties. Here the A1A beach road was exactly that: a road beside the beach, a four-lane ribbon of asphalt that split the city and its people from the sand, surf, and deep blue of the Atlantic. At the far end, five or so miles down in this direction, the road curved off onto Southeast 17th Street and eventually intersected Route 1 Federal Highway near the airport. The sands of the beach ran straight south all the way to the northern side of the Fort Lauderdale Port Everglades Cruise Port inlet. Between the start of that public beach and the 17th Street curve lay nothing but a block-wide scurvy strip of non-descript souvenir malls and haggard bars. Trendy new hi-rise resorts clamored up to the water’s edge alongside dated, tumbledown, mom-and-pop hotels, and between and among those, like stubborn shoots of weed, more bars and convenience stores, franchised eateries, and tee-shirt vendor shops—the storied “strip”, the “cruise” that was, the former Where the Boys Are hall of fame that was Fort Lauderdale Beach.
The speed limit all the rest of the way in to work was 30 miles per hour. During season, endless wavelets of tourists constantly sloshed across the road from their hotels and out of the bars toward the water, turning Gail’s commute into a gauntlet grind. But it was May. It was…6:34. Spring break was two weeks over. The first few battalions of tourists were beginning their northward migration, more and more of them would join the herd every week. Soon, the workers and the permanently browned geezers would have the place back to themselves, and none of that crowd, which included Gail, ever drove the speed limit. So she was right on time, albeit on Gail time, but she would be there, no problem, before Mr. Stallworth could get impatient and start walking across the parking lot to the security office to get the spare key. Nobody liked to make sweet old Job Stallworth change his routine. It was bad juju.
A light breeze had been blowing all night and then had stiffened just after sunrise. It pulled a greasy mist of sand and salt up over the gentle froth at the edge of the ocean and across the road in front of her all along the rest of her route in. She could feel the summery wetness coming in through the car’s AC vents and coating her like a spray-on tan. There was no escaping south Florida’s humidity.
“Jesus,” she said, wrenching the car’s sun visor around to block out the white screech of light hitting the left side of her face. Her skin began to prickle in the beams of heat.
6:37.
‘Not too far off from her traditional arrival time.
6:30, go to hell.
A jogger dashed across the street close enough to her that she had to stomp hard on the brakes. She narrowed her eyes to slits and leaned forward in her seat. The runner gave no indication that there should be any problem. Her change in position pulled her shoulder belt tight.
“What the fuck did I do to my shoulder?” she wondered, rolling her arm in its socket and wincing again.
~~~~
Fort Lauderdale 1
In 1513, Juan Ponce de León, in search of gold and land holdings for the King of Spain, sailed north and west from the port of San Juan in Puerto Rico with a small squadron of wooden ships and hardy men. Catching his keels on a mysterious north-flowing current, his intrepid group was drawn to, and so discovered the “island” La Florida, which he promptly claimed for his king.
Recording of the actual site of his landing is unclear, but it is generally held that he set anchor somewhere just offshore of the modern-day cities of either Melbourne or Saint Augustine, quiet harbors pocking the east coast of what today is commemoratively called Florida.
Ships’ logs indicate that, from his arrival point, León turned southward and continued charting the coastal waters and shoreline all the way to the keys that trail off to the south and west. Popular legend holds that he was looking for the Fountain of Youth. Historians dismiss this. León was a businessman, not a mystic.
On his way, he passed a shallow tidal inlet near a small freshwater lake at the mouth of an unnamed river. Unbeknownst to him, the sandy portage, impassable for his ships, had been used by the indigenous Tequesta and Calusa for centuries as a seasonal fish camp and crossing point on their travels between large, permanent settlements of their own, located inland to the north and south.
Captain de León did not stop there. Gaps in the reefs protecting the beach from the surf were too narrow, and he had taken on adequate provisions at his landing anchorage, three days’ sail from the spot.
He made but the barest of mention of the river mouth in the ship’s log, one of several minor features he marked as lying between safer points of entry to what must be the wild interior of the great mass of lush, green lands.
The place offered him nothing he needed.
~~~~
Jude—La Hacienda Serena
He rolled the throttle of his Honda back and weaved through the congestion, breezing due east through the last of the traffic signals on the 17th Street causeway, and up onto the western rise of the great arc of the E. Clay Shaw drawbridge. The deco, rook’s tower stack of the Pier hotel rose into view on his left as traffic allowed his approach to the peak of the span. Seven stories below him, the Intracoastal Waterway (to the locals, the ICW or, colloquially, the “inner-coastal”) slunk its lazy course in to and out of the Port Everglades inlet, twice daily feeding and then, in turn, being fed by the tides of the Atlantic and the freshwater push of the New River into the remnants of Lake Mabel.
Just as he first caught sight of the top of the antenna tower of a 220-foot yacht tied up to the quay of the resort, below and on the far side of the ICW, the alarm bell for the drawbridge sounded and wobbly traffic gates swung down across all the lanes of the causeway, blocking the work-ward progress of the grumbling bleary mass in whose company he had been moving. Jude cut the bike’s engine, leaving it in gear and resting it on the transmission. No one was going anywhere for at least five full minutes. He took off his helmet as the road cantilevered high into the air in front of him and his commuter compatriot horde.
Sitting near the crest of the bridge afforded a best-in-the-city view, even with its draw in the up position. He was back far enough from the barrier but still high enough so that he could see all the hotel and sentinel condominiums of the beach strip section of Fort Lauderdale spread out ahead of him and to his left, running northward. To his right, he could see the continuation stand of high-rises guarding the mouth of the inlet, and further southward down the ICW and the treed spit of the John Lloyd State Park, the wavering suggestions of still more towers veiled by the morning surf mist along the coastline. At its highest point, each side of the draw section of the bridge provided separate, railed-in quads of sidewalk where tourists on bicycle or on foot could stop and take pictures of the state of man’s havoc on the panorama. In the morning cool now, these little corrals were chock full of sightseers snapping photos.
He made a mental note to incorporate the bridge into one of his regular runs so that he might stop and get a good look at the lay of his new town. Jude was undoubtedly one of a very small group of locals who would be slowing down a little here each day when he “did the bridge”, both to take in the view and to check for the red sky in the morning on the way to work, or the red sky at night going home.
On this morning, the sky before him was an uneven white-blue parachute domed up overhead. A thin vein of columbia blue rested on the water’s edge at the far horizon, beat down to a line by the overspreading white of the sun.
Behind him, he knew, beyond its small brave cluster of shiny office buildings downtown, the city of Fort Lauderdale sprawled westward for twenty-odd miles in a flat, borderless morass of reticulated suburban towns slashed with man-made slackwater canals, black still drainage ponds, and jangling strip malls. And still further west, beyond the formal city limits, he could picture the beaten-down swath of the Everglades flowing in its aeonic track toward the Gulf and the Caribbean, basking in its unrelenting wet heat like an immense staring alligator, waiting just off the banks of the froth of mankind, its baleful eye fixed on the eastern mess, watching the territory lost; waiting, waiting, waiting.
In another sense, back there behind him too, he knew, was his old life, as unblinking and empty as that gator’s nictitating, iridescent marble. A life to be left there, behind, left to hover in the steaming air above that swamp of memory.
The regal passing of a seventy-five foot sailboat through the bridge opening peeled him out of his daydream. The big boat made its way out to sea before him as he sat there on the span of the western cantilever. He could see the boat’s pilot at the wheel, craning to see what conditions might await him in the comparatively narrow passage of the inlet jetty.
As the bridge lowered back into place, mating with its eastern piece, the breeze off the water freshened in Jude’s face. He could smell the salt in the breath of the water. Directly forward of him, the land and the march of concrete monoliths gave way to the blue of an ocean that seemed to slip off the edge of the earth at all points north, south, and east of here.
And that was just where he was going now.
~~~~
Past the Pier, the road veered to his left and away northward from the mouth of the Port Everglades inlet. Seventeenth Street became Ocean Boulevard, the Fort Lauderdale Beach section of Route A1A; and from the crook of this elbow, the coast route strung out northward with few interruptions for almost 400 miles, splitting the beachhead between the Atlantic and the ICW all the way to the Florida-Georgia state line.
He glanced around at his new road companions. At daybreak, six days a week, every week of every year since the 1930s, a great, faceless caravan gathered in the western boroughs and trekked toward the rising sun on this and three other roads that traversed the ICW at points in town north of here. In the winter—the Season—the ranks of this labor force numbered in the tens of thousands. Even now, in the dead heat and swelter of late spring, the four, wide lanes of roadway on 17th Street were thick with the immigrant and transient army.
It was his first morning joining the migration of these workers of “the seam”, these longshoremen of the palisade of derrick hotel fortresses and condominia puckered along the strand. Here, as in most tourist destinations, the resorts, curio shops, chain restaurants, seasonal apartments, and marinas gushed money all year long, a torrent during the winter months, now more of a lazy tidal flow. Jude and everyone around him on the bridge were the tenders of that flow, the feeders and the fixers, the minders and the menders, the fishermen and the finders of lost things. They scraped and painted and made lunch and mixed booze and trimmed hedges and opened doors. They drove the minibuses and the water taxis and the tour boats and the pedicabs. They dragged the rental jet skis out to the water, and they dragged the intrepid parachutists up into the air above the surf like puffy balloons on strings. They dragged the foolish from the waters that were over their heads, and they unfurled the umbrellas and massaged m’lady’s back and directed the good gentlemen to all the best golf courses and strip clubs inland.
They were the post-Edwardian downstairs people, those who subsisted on service-sector wages and the tips that trickled down to them from the upstairs. They waited on those who fancied themselves rich, those whose lives absolutely required things such as pied-á-terres and yacht slips and vacation itineraries and charter trips to catch fish they themselves would never deign to eat; those who came here to get away from their lives in their version of the real world, lives that Jude and everyone else on this highway driving to work at this time of day knew that they themselves were likely to observe only ever discretely and, if they knew what was good for them, quietly from the metaphoric and occasionally literal sideboard.
He eased over the bridge and down its eastern ramp, making the leftward curve and passing the fire station and then the ticket booth for the Jungle Queen tour boat in the southeast corner of the yacht basin of the Hacienda Serena. He geared down to brake his bike, flicked his left directional, and glided into the roundabout at the front entrance of the venerable old resort, rolling under the concrete catwalks that connected the main bland tower block on his right to the outbuildings of the resort complex and to the beach on the opposite side of the A1A.
The elevated walkways were a popular architectural detail. They afforded guests private, elevated access to their tanning spots on the shore, back over and across the A1A, which could otherwise be somewhat uncomfortable to cross when holiday or festival rabble choked the street with interloping urban locals from the western reaches who picnicked there with their air-shaking subsonics and their menacing glowers at the light-skinned visitors. The hotel grounds also featured a deco-style lounging pool and the obligatory tiki-bar, all on the second floor of the building directly in front of Jude now. There was a small sandwich café in the marina-view rooms building to his left.
Built in 1950, this hotel had once ruled the nascent beach strip. In that heyday, La Hacienda Serena had been a laughing adolescent princess of a place, a flirty Gidget that curled her finger at the drunken college boys and girls cavorting in the Elbo Room or the Copa or the ‘Trove dive bars just up the way, beckoning them back into her embrace with promises that she’d keep the fun rolling on into Mr. Sinatra’s wee small hours of the night.
Now Jude got the sense that the tiara that had slipped in the years since Tuggle and Merrit and Melanie and Angie were last here on spring break. In fact, these days the ‘Serena was more the stooped dowager queen of the beach, her smiling face sun-baked and peeling from a billboard that a high season—perhaps the high season for the very city itself—was now more than a few years and several maintenance calendar periods past.
He could picture long, hired cars pulling into the roundabout, reflecting the lights of the chandeliers in the lobby as they disgorged their second-tier celebrities and be-shaded soldati of lesser mobsters’ and their molls down from New York or Atlantic City for a winter’s beach holiday.
Now guests most often piled out of nice minivans and dingy, mid-scale SUVs.
What once had been the tide of happy-drunk, hormonal post-adolescents and posing greasers from America’s naïve past had receded, ebbed, and was now come full in again, but the frat boys and their gals and the Manhattanites and baddies from Chicago had given way to a flood of near-affluent families with kids carrying swim toys. The guests no longer scurried to hide from the pop and freezing white of the Land cameras in the hands of the yammering press corps, they arranged themselves and posed for red-eye reducing pre-flashes before the music of the fiestas de la quinceañera and Jewish wedding receptions, bar and bat mitzvahs got started. The valets smiled and carted the mismatched bags of good, decent folks from the greater Des Moines area or from Poughkeepsie or Dayton or Syracuse; locals who could not afford or hadn’t the taste for the tawdry swank of Miami Beach or the haughty breeding of West Palm. And while it was obviously a demographic who could still afford a Florida sea-side vacation and in so doing keep the doors of the Old Lady open, it was decidedly not, in both appearance and demeanor, the folk who could afford a getaway at the W or the Atlantic or the Regency or even the Hilton, further up the beach, near the modern visitors’ center and shopping/entertainment complexes of the newest boom section of the city.
Still, Jude thought, even with the paradigm shift, the ‘Serena was here, unflinching, rising up firm and stubborn over her staked-out section of sand. The operation must have continued to turn a meager profit through the years and the inevitable changes of flag, and so it must be holding its own even now, when economic downturn was the operative phrase nearly everywhere else in the country. The general consensus he’d gathered was that season-in, season-out, the old girl frequently managed to fill herself up from January to the end of April, and again at least on weekends during the height of the low-season months.
Adding to her perennial turn, too, he knew, was the BOAT SHOW. In the fall of 1959, the eponymous Show Management Corporation had begun throwing a marketing soiree and float-in for local yacht owners that had since grown to become the largest in-water trade show in the marina industry worldwide. FLIBS, the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, was a spectacle paean to the twin post-modern gods of male hubris and ostentation constructed anew each fall on the grounds and in the slip basins of La Hacienda Serena. It attracted billions of dollars’ worth of obscene opulence to the facility every year, in fact constituting the hard-kernel core from which all the hotel’s maintenance and improvements fed.
The resort complex was made up of two blocks of rooms, the premier in a modest high-rise tower, and a lowly sister barrack of marina-view rooms. In sundry locations on the grounds, she offered expansive halls suitable for weddings, parties, banquets, and business meetings accommodating up to 500. There were office spaces for yacht brokers and chandlers, a dive shop, a small souvenir store, and a couple of trendy boutiques. It was a small, self-contained, dated but staunchly three-star beach hotel that, counting the resort and marina staff, third-party vendors and day laborers, kept close to 800 people uniformed and gainfully employed somewhere on her grounds every day, all year round.
Jude wheeled into the back lots of the compound and parked his bike in the shade of a giant fichus tree. The marina office outbuilding was on his right, on the eastern side of the ICW. He slung his daypack over his shoulder, turned left, and strode across the lots toward A-dock, the site of his new job.
He was dressed in shorts and a plain tee shirt, as far away from his old uniforms as he could physically get. Once he’d proven himself aboard the Amphitrite, he’d be awarded a tee with a line drawing representation of that boat silk-screened over its breast pocket and across its back. Though they might appear as little more than cheap articles of underwear to those outside the boating industry, under pain of formal reprimand or even possible dismissal from a working vessel, boat shirts were expressly never given out or sold as souvenirs to the general public. They were the bona fide uniform of the crew of a working vessel and, as such, were very much a sign of professional employment or otherwise status-most-favored for someone that the captain or crew of a vessel bestowed upon a very select group of people. There was a concrete, if tacit, protocol surrounding their wear. They meant that you knew someone on the water who had knowledge of and respected some aspect of your personality, character, and/or nautical expertise. Wearing it meant you belonged to an exclusive club. You were a working yachty.
He checked his Brietling®—6:10.
There were undoubtedly some guests staying at the hotel even now, in low season. At this hour though, only a few Haitian hotel staff puttered about, tending the grounds’ aralias and black torch shrubs. A hunchbacked crone dragged a largish wheeled barrel through the lot, sweeping up cigarette butts and bits of trash. A gaggle of housemaids pushed their carts toward their assignments. The sing-song patois of their morning chatter echoed in the lee of the building. Jude imagined that eventually he’d get to know some of these people; maybe learn a little Creole. It might come in handy.
He nodded and offered a genuine smile as he passed the burnt chocolate man and his wheeled trash barrel.
The true and biggest reason for the relative prosperity of the ‘Serena resort (and arguably, for the entire city) bobbed in the harbor waters all around Jude as he made his way toward A-dock. If the cliché mantra said to underpin all the machinations of real estate also applied to the locating of marine properties, here was the paradigm in physical form: location, location, location. If you had a boat and wanted to go to the beach in south Florida, it was likely that you would eventually be spending time at La Hacienda Serena. She was the logical and logistically optimum jump-off port for all Bahamian and Caribbean destinations, and over the years, a multi-billion dollar support infrastructure bloomed in Fort Lauderdale whose sole purpose was the scooping up of the cash being shed by the vibrant, modern bourgeois class and their armies of attendant servants and crew, the stations for which were moored in the basins of the ‘Serena and in dozens of smaller marinas tucked into coves and along river and canal sides all over the city.
From the foot of the main tower of the hotel and an adjacent lower building whose roof supported the resort’s large swimming pool and sun deck, a vast pasture of ‘Serena parking lot fanned out to the west all the way to a short row of outbuildings crowded along the side of ICW. First in the 1920s, and then again with help from the Army Corps of Engineers in 1930, glint-eyed speculators scooped out Lake Maya and hundreds of the surrounding fluvials, gullies, and ditches to create a sprawling meshwork of navigable waterway. Fort Lauderdale became The Venice of the Americas. The peninsula that provided the shoulders for the piers and docks of the ‘Serena marina was made of the stuff that was dragged up from all that work, and today it remained, if slightly tattered around the piping of the Old Queen’s tuffet, one of the largest luxury yacht marinas in south Florida.
The ‘Serena marina was an aquatic, pay-as-you-go, boat staging area whose nearly 40 million dollars per year in official profit, together with several hundred thousand in ancillary, clandestine business revenue and unofficial cash flows, represented a thick slice of a multibillion-dollar luxury accommodations industry pie. She advertised accommodations for 255 vessels ranging in size from 40 to over 225 feet, and vast shoals of specialized workers from the outlying suburbs of Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Miami, and all through the Keys came every day to feed on the syrupy edges of a bulging, oozing tart of discretionary, though rarely discrete money.
The boats here were just plain big; the palatial playthings of the über-wealthy of the world. Jude walked past a vessel named The Dream. Even in their dreams, most middle-Americans could not begin to conjure up something so grand and associate it with what was thought of as a “boat”, much less wrap their minds around the idea that something big and gaudy was both privately owned and only occasionally used. She was all of a gleaming white 200 feet, decked in rich teak and trimmed with lacquered mahogany cap rails and chrome brightwork. Her slip rental, Jude knew from experience, came in at well over $40,000 per month. Charges for running her air conditioners, lights, and food storage coolers and freezers ran anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 per month. The number of full-time crew fluctuated between nine and twenty-two, with a varying number of daily stringers called aboard depending upon the owner’s plans and penchants. Salaries for the staffs of what amounted to private, floating, five-star hotels such as The Dream rang up into the neighborhood of $200,000 a year for the captain, down to around 40 grand for the lowliest young deckhand. Jude scanned over the sleek of her hull as he walked by. All tolled, a “boat” such as The Dream, having been delivered to its owners at a cost of around $30 million and not including fuel, cost at least $3 million per year to keep afloat.
Quite a nice little toy you’ve got there, Daddy Warbucks, Jude snarked to himself.
Most of that money was channeled into the revenue stream that flowed into La Hacienda Serena.
During season, the marina typically accommodated 12 vessels in the size range of The Dream. There were also slips for 26 vessels that brought in an average of a quarter of a million dollars each, per year. The rest of the slips were filled with “smaller” boats that would pay anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000 each for their space and their electricity.
Usually by this time of year, most of the big boats were required by their insurance companies to head north to avoid the possibility of the area’s getting struck by hurricane. An annual migration of hundreds of millions of dollars from here to the harbors of New York, Long Island, Newport, Boston, and Nantucket was spawned by this prescribed prudence. But a few like ‘Dream would summer here at the insistence of obstinate owners willing to pony up an additional $30,000 or $40,000 to cover the risk of storm damages in exchange for a season’s worth of convenience.
No other property in the city offered the access to that infrastructure and scope of marine accommodation like the ‘Serena, and because of the geographical limitations of the Lauderdale strand itself, no other property ever would. Quite simply, no other property had the space.
A couple of generations ago, the writer John D. MacDonald penned a series of detective novels following the exploits of a mythic everyman hero named Travis McGee. In those paperbacks, the character McGee lived on a boat named The Busted Flush in slip number F18.
Jude had read all 21 of MacDonald’s books as a boy. The character of McGee was the archetype whose iterations dotted the literary, film, and television landscapes with the bad-but-loveable boy-men who drank too much, got knocked around, involved themselves with women that were just no good for them, and solved crimes without taking credit because they were too rough-hewn and tragic. MacDonald had written about Florida during a simpler and starkly less expensive time, Jude thought.
Between Travis’s time and now, people with a nose for money had swarmed into Florida like rats. The reality through which Jude walked today was that boats like the ‘Flush—and indeed, characters like McGee—would likely not be allowed berthing at the ‘Serena marina. He mused that it was unlikely, in all his jaunty capers combined, that Travis McGee would have culled enough cash to pay to keep the ‘Flush anywhere near here today. Besides, people who got involved with the wrong people and fought a lot and drank a lot and were rough-hewn and tragic typically worked at the ‘Serena, they didn’t stay here as guests.
Jude reached the head of the A-dock quay and glanced at the time again. 6:15. The first sport wasn’t due on the ‘Trite for another hour, hour and a half. Plenty of time to stow his gear and go over the startup routine with his new captain, Danie Fischer.
The weather was still clear, but a few high-tops had begun to build themselves up on the eastern horizon, about ten miles out. With any luck, at the end of the afternoon those same stacks would scoot in on the breeze and bunch up to the west over the Everglades. About the time he and his new captain would be bringing their last happy sport home with his trophies then, maybe the wind would come back around westerly and the clouds would build back, come thundering across here, and give the ‘Trite a good rinse off. A cloudburst would go a long ways toward easing the heat of the day, and it always sent the tourists back to their watering holes or their rooms.
In, out, back and forth. Jude Saint George’s life amounted to just breathing now, looking for a rhythm, hoping for a place where he could hunker down and rest.
~~~~
Epilogue
“Not all folk grows up de same times in ‘dere life. Look out over ‘dere, de water. Is like dat.
“Hold out you arms in de front. Look. She blow, de wind, de same from ‘dere to ‘dere, from hand north to hand south, whatever. She blow same. De same, same, same. But de sea is come different everywhere at same times, even in de wind. Look. Blue ‘dere, green ‘dere. Dark over ‘dere, and ‘dere she silver in de sun, like diamond.
“‘Dat because what down ‘dere underneath, mon. Because what down ‘dere. Some place deep, way deep. Other place, de reef. Nothin’ da same everyplace but da wind, mon. Nothin’.”
— Job Lincoln Stallworth, La Hacienda Serena Resort and Marina
~~~~
Under billows of white puffed against a cerulean sky we swim, pull against the drift. Head down, pretending a heedlessness of the ramifications of flight from familial blankets and colored sun shades and gritty snacks back on the beach, we aim for out, for anywhere but here, for our own promised but unnamed and unseeable place over the misty horizon. And so, to ourselves pretending, we might slip beyond the sight of an anxious crowd that stands, hand to brow in the tamer lapping, we who are driven by the selfsame forces that bring the sharks up from the shafted darkness to the shallows of the reef.
There are memories (later—after we’ve come ashore) of having been moved back, inexorably and despite whatever determination we had with us out there to stay the course, stymied by the play of atmospherics and scends beyond our callow ken, and inevitably by time too, by the sun’s arcing through its zenith and the swell of a gathering dark in the west, and by the slowing of the march of our stroke as though our arms filled with purpled lead osmosed from the belly of the clouds.
Confidence is a skin against a change in the weather, but it is not a sheath with which we all are born, and so we are taught by wind and rain and tide that there are limits to all feats. Perhaps we are all at last overtaken by our fear of the monsters swimming in the dark below. Perhaps we allow into our psyche some doubt that a spot on the distant white strand we set out for awaits us at all. Do we deserve it? What if we are not meant to find it? Why has everyone else turned back?
What if we are wrong?
And so we turn, most of us. We curve, head for some nearer shore, or we simply roll over and let that tide push us back in to the beach through the little breakers.
Zen instructs that there awaits a peace for those that learn to remove desire from their life. And so maybe we acquiesce; we listen to old Zen. We relax. We rationalize that the contentment of that lesser peace is more the norm, that the exertion of keeping our dreams safe against the inflowing tide of time would likely kill us anyway. We quiet ourselves and get on with the business of living, of just holding our mouths above the splashing of the waves in order to breathe.
In time, we stop thinking about any “lesser peace” at all. It is enough, this that we have. Thoreau nods down knowingly from heaven, but quiet desperation? More like quiet resignation.
And any stalwart stubborn souls looking up, then, while still in the water, any yet taking their corrective bearing or their compass reading on any truer, original course—echoes of our own attempt—these we relegate to the stuff of childhood, of silliness, of impossible impracticality or God-given trait; best left behind by us. Let our own young swim out beyond the rollers (though probably only at play). Let us stand at the edge of the blue and call them to come back.
On the sand we hold our hands over our eyes and look far out over the water and package our former hardy selves into memories of fond and wide-eyed fantasies of those too full of ardor and obnoxious strength to be beaten down yet by the trade winds of reality, by the pelagic drifts of a more pragmatic vision, a more everyday ebb and flood. Our children splash in the foam while we come to grips with the limitations of our resolve. Smiling benignly, we let go of unruly things that cause us discomfort here, on the shore of what harbor we’ve found, where we’ve decided to live out our days.
We bite into the sandwiches we’ve brought, and we feel the bits of sand grit that have snuck in there caught and grinding in our teeth.
But not everyone settles into his life so easily. There are those who founder in the waves a little longer. Indeed, they themselves might wonder if they’ll ever come in at all.
And seeing them so far out in the water, we might fear that they will drown, or at least we wonder if they will not ever allow themselves to be happy.
(Baxter Springs, Kansas) - Discover how a beloved high school guidance counselor twists fate on behalf of four troubled misfits, and turns their life around.
