Brenda and the F Word

“I had a dream that I could speak to. I had a dream I could call my own.”
Etta Jones song

Why do I weep when I watch my daughter sing this on her college video? I weep because I see such promise, such passion. Promise, like a parent’s pride, is a heavy, too heavy, burden to bear when you’re young. Because it’s tied into other people’s expectations. Hopes and dreams. I was lucky in this respect. I grew or stumbled into promise and passion somewhat late in life. Which is why I try to be so careful when it comes to projecting hopes onto the shoulders of my children. Shoulders that are not yet strengthened or broken by the weight of too much disappointment. But watching my daughter sing and thinking of my son, of the gifts that he also possesses, I’m torn. Torn between a longing to shout for joy and the suspicion that such a shout will alert the gods and bring their wrath down upon my house. So instead, I whisper. I whisper and I wish so hard that my children find a dream to speak to. A dream to call their own.

I also wish my son could sleep….

Last week, thanks to Mr. Wolcott (that’s James Wolcott), I had some readers drop by from Wegrow Siedlce. This week, they’re arriving in droves from Prnu Parnumaa, Vasternorrlands Lan, and yes, Jawa Barat. I’d really like to go there. I think…

Maybe it’s a case of mistaken identity. Maybe it’s my doppelganger. But there’s another Brenda out there somewhere who resides at my same AOL address. Occasionally, I receive these fantastically surreal updates on her or is it my other life? This morning, for instance. My dear friend, Jeff Chubb, CC’s me on plans for our weekend. After exchanging vital data re cellphones etc., he says: “You can either hunt/stalk turkey or shoot small game before cutting wood…”
To which I replied: Jeff: I was gonna go see the Michael Jackson movie. But stalking/hunting deer sounds like a blast. We are talking bow and arrow, right?(Shooting small game is out. Dad’s Purdy is in the shop) What else should I bring? My ukelele, maybe?

Which leads to another e mail from my friend Lisa Davis. She wrote last year about a horse…

Subj: Information on Mare
Date: 1/27/2009 10:55 Eastern Standard Time
From: Lisa.Davis@Sternbottom&Tate
To: Brendawhatever@wherever

Dear Brenda:
I was copied on your e mail searching for a home for your horse. Can you give me some information?
How old is she? When did she have the foal and where is the baby? Has she been used strictly for breeding purposes? What are the reasons for giving her up?
Thank you for the information.
Sincerely,
Lisa

Reply:
Subj: Information on Mare
Date: 1/28/2009 9:44 Eastern Standard Time
From: Brenda whatever@wherever
To: Lisa.Davis@Sternbottom&Tate

Dear Lisa,
The mare is four years old. She had the foal three weeks ago and we gave the baby up for adoption. (To a lovely family on E 4th St.) As you might imagine, breeding has become a bit complicated here as space in the back shower room is tight for one fucking horse, never mind two. As for our reasons for giving her up… Sunday she ate thirteen rolls of jumbo paper towels and four tubes of Crest toothpaste. Also her whinnying is annoying the neighbors.
Looking forward to hearing from you soonest.
Best,
Brenda

Why do many middle-aged men leave their wives for their wives’ best friend? Because it’s familiar but fresh? New but not? Because it rocks the boat without getting them too wet? I’ve been thinking about this, lately. Not because it’s happened to me. But because I’m curious. I have this crazy theory that a ‘good wife’ is responsible for planting a seed of doubt in the heart and head of her husband; for keeping him just the tiniest bit uncertain. This is because too much certainty hardens the heart and closes the mind and makes men hard to reach and rigid. Stalin, for instance. Or the Taliban. Now, there’s a bunch of guys whose wives could certainly do with planting a seed or two of doubt in the hearts of their men. Seriously, though…I worked with a very powerful women at the beginning of my career. She would give me tips before pitching the powers-that-be (mostly men, of course.) “Never preface a sentence with the words, I think or I believe,” she would say. “It will only weaken your argument. And men won’t listen.” She was right. Which brings me back to where I started. Sort of. I think (oh dear, there I go) middle-aged men leave their wives for their wives’ best friends not because change is good. But because just a little bit of change is good. Just enough change to free them from the uncertainty that comes, so inevitably, with middle age. The uncertainty that leads them to believe that their wives don’t understand them. Lord! How I love that phrase. “My wife doesn’t understand me.” How many women fall for that one, I wonder? Anyway, feel free to fill in some my blanks. (including the proper grammatical use of wive’s versus wife’s best friend. Is there a possessive plural or not?)

The two pilots? The ones who “forgot” to land in Minneapolis? You wanna tell me what was up, like 35,000 ft. up, with that? I mean, they were definitely napping right? No way you’re so caught up in a cockpit conver, you ignore THIRTEEN desperate calls and e mails from the ground. Not possible. But this is the thing. I figure there’s no more boring job on earth than flying. First of all cuz you’re on automatic pilot most of the time. And second, because if you’re lucky, what the fuck is there to see out there: sky, more sky, a couple of clouds, maybe. The only kind of stuff that makes flying more interesting is precisely the kind of stuff you pray to God never, ever happens. Like getting hijacked, or having a bunch of birds fried in your engine and landing on a river. The rest of the time, it’s ho hum, ho hum. I’ll have another cup of coffee, please. Unless, of course, you’re the happy pilot on an Air France jet and there are two flight attendants lap dancing and stripping in the cockpit. (I saw the clip on Gadling). Anyway, what a wake up call. For all of us.
The only story better than the two napping pilots who forgot to land is the one about the couple who forgot to look at the brochure before boarding Italy’s very first all gay cruise. Apparently, they had NO idea till it was too late. Huh? Were the 1,498 same sex couples checking in all around them pretending to be straight? And if not, what did exactly did they think, seeing guys holding hands? Kissing? Did they think it was some kind of friendly, Freemason’s cruise around the Med? Apparently, they’re suing. Only in Italy, folks. Only in Italy where the Prime Minister is screwing around with under age prostitutes at his vacation villa can a couple still be SHOCKED by an all gay cruise…

Easier said than done. Turning the killer around, I mean. Our skipper insisted conditions were ideal. The towering waves about to swallow us whole were nothing more than “des petits moulins.” Baby sheep. “I’m a coward,” I shouted. “I want to go back.”  The real baby sheep were the men.  I was surrounded by deaf mutes. Why were all these macho men afraid to open their mouths. (Except to vomit, of course.) At last, the skipper agreed to go back. With one stipulation. We must all remove our life jackets before entering the harbor.  Fine. If we made it back alive, I was more than willing to help this fucking auto mechanic save precious face.

We fled towards mist-shrouded shores, trailing a wreck of ship-wrecked dreams behind us.The moment we reached Deshaies, the sun broke through and a gorgeous rainbow painted the sky. For me, it was the end of a nautical nightmare. For the others, a minor backfire, an hilarious beginning to what would become a a perfect cruise. As we waved goodbye (more like good riddance), I felt the earth move under my feet. Jesus Christ! I thought. It’s Soufriere, the island’s volcano about to blow its stack. But no. It was symptoms of what sailors call ‘le mal de terre.’ The landsick dizziness suffered by all those who spend too many days at sea.

Preparing a meal aboard one’s sloop is not as easy as Pat and Bill Buckley might have once implied. Particularly when you’re rinsing three heads of lettuce in a pgymy sized sink, dicing, mincing and otherwise mutilating your fingers with a kitchen knife the size of a jungle machete, and dealing with a pot of boiling oil on a stove that reminds me of a toddler’s swing set. (The stove, you see, is set on these little things called gimbals–NOT like the department store–which allow it to move back and forth.) Stoked on adrenaline, nursing 3rd degree burns, and bandaged hands, we served up garlic buttered pasta, Danish mussels, cheese, and flambeed bananas. I’m exhausted.

Retiring early seemed like a splendid idea. Surely, the warmth of a dry berth and much needed sleep would revive my fantasies. Why was I the only one concerned about our skipper’s revelation that the ship’s radio was broken? With no SOS, I assumed we’d sink to the sounds of music. And what about other disconcerting facts dredged up from our inebriated, slurring skipper? Why should I worry if we were only his second charter, ever? And what about the fact he’d had only one year’s sailing experience and preferred working as an auto mechanic? “He lives by the sea,” said my French friend, reassuringly. “Yeah. Like the man who lives by the sword,” I replied .

R. dismissed my gnawing fears and anxiety to gross exaggeration or a slight misunderstanding. Easy for him to say, of course, with a French vocabulary consisting of two words: tirer and foc. “Shouldn’t he, at least, show us where he’s HIDDEN the fucking life-jackets?” I said, as he burrowed his head beneath the pillow. “And I don’t expect a flight attendant’s tour of the safety features, darling…” Or do I. On second thought, it would have been heaven, hearing those dull speeches I usually pretend to yawn or doze through before take-off.  Tonight, I desperately wanted to believe in emergency chutes that slid into the sea from portholes, and those oxygen masks that pop down in front of your face before drowning. And those vests tucked neatly under your seat that come with little whistles for summoning help. Or how about a  harnass, R? You know, the ones we see in sailing documentaries?

R. was snoring. Fast asleep in a dreamless stupor, no doubt. I was wide awake, listening to the endless plop!plop!plop! of raindrops. To the grating sounds of our anchor dragging on the bottom. Shit! The fucker’s left it dragging, I thought. I’d read Hammond Innes stories when dragging anchors and sudden shifting winds drove boats onto unseen reefs and splintered them into a zillion tiny toothpicks… I was up. Up like a jack-in-the-box, wrestling with the hatch cover, sticking my head out into the pouring rain.Were we in the same position? Because the skipper sure as hell wasn’t. He was passed out, sprawled on a bench in the galley, snoring with yet another empty bottle of Boulogne rum in his arms.

I woke to the startling sounds of pounding feet. Anchors aweigh! Too late to jump ship. I clawed my way out of my berth and lurched off towards the bridge. Talk about a test for sea legs. Even rubber legged Gumby would have broken a limb down here. It was a deluge outside. Chaos. I straddled the hatch and watched the waves flood the deck. The water was over the winches. Ropes lay like twisted spaghetti beneath our feet. My friends kept tripping over the milk jugs. We were doing a very unconservative 9 1/2 knots in 6 meter seas. This was supposed to be a landlubber’s sunshine cruise not try outs for America’s Cup. “Seven hours,” shouted the skipper with a sadistic grin. Seven hours with no radio and a pit the size of a small meteorite in my stomach. One sickening thud and the boom flipped. Gybed is the word I remember from childhood lessons on a placid lake.FOC!!! We could have been beheaded. I heard one woman howling for her mother while her husband wretched his breakfast into space. I sat alone, stone-faced, fighting the urge to just leap into the sea and get it over with. I did manage to light what I figured would be my last cigarette before shrieking for my husband, R.

No way I’d allow him to go down by himself in the death cabin, pinioned to his berth below the bow. And then he appeared…Hugging an armful of life-jackets. Astounding. Marvelous, this man of mine. It was time to make a decision. Time to turn this killer around…

OK. We’re nearly there. But there are 70 for drinks here tonight. So I’m off to pick up rolling coat racks. More later.

Our captain reeked of rum as he casually flung box after box beneath two wooden benches in the salon. A rather grandiose term, I thought, for the living room mid-ship. Where were my illusions of everything being ship-shape and tidy? Slinking past him, I edged my way towards our forward cabin which was next to the head. This is another nautical term I’ve never quite understood. I mean, how does a john end up a head? And what does either have to do with a toilet? The manual pumping system had a sort of medieval charm to it, I suppose.  As for the berths? They were short and shaped like two thin wedges of pizza pie. I decided to unpack my wardrobe. At this point, I have to confess. I am a raving hypochondriac. Years of incessant travel have done nothing to cure or improve my condition. I’ve suffered everything from a mild coronary infarction walking the moors of Scotland to advanced symptoms of leprosy and elephantiastis in Tahiti. My husband once cursed me through a 24 hour case of trachoma. I developed the disease at home while watching a victim go blind during a documentary about Ellis Island. But this trip would be different. With two doctors aboard, it was a hypochondriac’s dream come true. After dumping duffel bags of clothes and drugs on my berth,  I headed back to the deck.

The men were scurrying around in skimpy French bathing suits and squeaky new Topsiders, all pretending they knew exactly what they were doing.  Delayed by our ripped mainsail, we were finally making for Deshaies, a port four hours up the coast. After a good night’s sleep, we planned to cross the ocean passage between Guadeloupe and Antigua, arriving just in time for cocktails in English Harbor. There might even be time for a picnic on the island of Montserrat.

The first inkling of trouble came with the decision to cut the engine and hoist the sails. There’s nothing less romantic than the drone of a diesel .  Real sailors sneer at the slow, polluted progress of stinkpots. Forget the rain, the fickle off-shore winds. Forget the fact no one knew a fucking fo’scle from a frigate. Finally, forget the unbelievable fact our skipper spoke only Creole. The man’s grasp of nautical French was limited to exactly two words: tirer, or pull and foc, or jib. Foc. Foc. Foc. Presumably, there was more to sailing than pulling on the jib. But that first ecstatic moment when the wind billows through your sails and the boat plows into the sea at a 30 degree angle is indeed unforgettable. The men were howling with glee, gripped by the thrill I associate with riding the Cyclone at Coney. My husband was at the helm. Oh Christ! Surely not. The last time my husband was even near a helm was on vacation in North Carolina. Within minutes of blithely pushing off from shore, he’d overturned a Catamoran and was seen drifting, quickly, towards Bermuda. My sister and I called the Coast Guard. We then waited and watched while he shrunk to a speck in the distance. His only reaction when the Coast Guard towed him in four hours later was a sheepish grin and boastful pointing to sea soaked blisters.

This time, we were in shark infested waters. One wrong move and we’d end up instant human sushi. And where the foc was our skipper? No amount of beseeching or screaming from above seem to rouse him from below. Sticking my head down through the hole (sorry, hatch) in the deck, I saw him splicing wires. When he finally emerged, it was to the ear splitting sounds of Jamaican ram jam,  some sort of reggae rap music. He’d been repairing the sound system.  Clad in a short yellow rain slicker with a tight silver belt (I kid you not! A silver belt), he swayed on to the deafening beat as we danced towards a watery doom. The speakers were rolling all over the deck. Cleverly camouflaged in white plastic milk jugs, he’d hitched them to the hatch with invisible filaments of fishing wire.What if someone tripped? I moaned and swore quietly under my breath.

Eventually, the port snuck into sight.  Deshaies is sublimely beautiful, a cove ringed with royal palms and twinkling white lights.  As we glided smoothly in, I put my visions of the Poseidon Adventure behind me and waved oh so  nonchalantly to fellow sailors moored for the night. I just might grow to like this, I thought. Stepping down the ladder to change into dry clothes, I promptly slid flat on my ass across the galley. A bottle of green Fairy dishwashing liquid had spilled when we hoisted the sails. The floor was covered with a greasy, film of soap suds. Our skipper was right behind me.  As I rose shakily to my feet and began sifting through buried stores, he morosely gulped his way through another bottle of rum. We’d squelched his plans, more like a pre hatched plot, to drive sixty kilometers back for a party…

Sorry, the photo is so fucking big, you need stadium seating to see it. But this is the antique model schooner that hangs above my desk. I love the furled sails, yellowed with age, and the web of black threads that dangle on dust-covered decks. A miniature anchor drags on the bottom of the primitive ocean backdrop and I wonder if the man who made it was someone like myself. Someone marooned at home with a landlocked love of the sea and sailing.

I don’t actually know how to sail, of course. But I’ve always reveled in this image of a windswept sea self. I long to hoist the jib, winch in the mizzenmast, and stand watch–all before bedding down in a womb-like berth. Or I did until a short while ago when I boarded a 35 ft. sloop on the island of Guadeloupe and set off on a cruise of the Caribbean. It was a cruise that left me with barely enough time to vomit before I abandoned ship, like the proverbial rat, and tottered ashore.

The adventure began with R. and a crew of visiting Frenchmen in a marina outside the city of Basse Terre. In return for several rounds of p’tit punch (small glasses of 100 proof sugar cane rum with a squeeze of fresh lime), we were regaled with stories of La Transat. Ah yes, La transat! I thought. The romance, the glamour, of this annual transatlantic race from Casablanca to Pointe a Pitre. Every sailor’s dream. A dream of Outre Mer that conjures up the days of Empire when everyone returned home to the Metropole. (A term still used by older island locals when referring to France, the mother country.) Just one night of tall tales and a slightly tipsy tour of yawls and ketches convinced us. Now was the moment to lay in the stores and head out to sea.

The next morning, we hired a skipper and his gleaming white sloop, the Rene Coussel, for a one week trip. After haggling over an early morning p’tit punch (the skipper not us)
we charted a course for Antiqua. Charted is a gross exaggeration. None of us, except the skipper, had ever handled anything larger than a Sunfish. Never mind a compass or a marine map. There would be six of us at about $100 a day. Which seemed a very small price to pay for the fulfillment of our fantasies.

The laying in of stores began the next day. It was pouring rain. The more seasoned sailors at the marina had suggested eggs and water. “So easy to prepare,” I thought. “A perfect choice.” I had visions of the late Pat Buckley buying dozens and whipping up omelettes and souffles for Bill. 84 eggs later, we remembered water. “Synonymous with survival,” I said, thinking of Tallulujah Bankhead in Lifeboat. Remember that movie? She lured and lost a fish with a diamond encrusted watch. “Six cases will either save us or sink us,” said R. And so it went. Five cans of cassoulet, four cans of beans and franks, pate, fifteen cans of fruit juice (enough to ward off an epidemic of scurvy), danish mussels, and sixteen rolls of toilet paper. Our skippers only request? Three litres of Boulogne Rum.

The day of departure dawned. Still raining. Freezing cold. Ignoring the weather, we loaded up two cars for the drive to the marina. I’d packed enough fancy clothing for a ball at Buckingham Palace: silk shirts, a cocktail dress, high heels, silk pyjamas. The French crew was still swallowing punch and choking back guffaws as we slid down the dock towards our slip. (Notice all my nautical language?) One glimpse of our skipper, drenched to the skin and clutching a mainsail, ripped in half, put a knot in my stomach. He was screaming at some stranger in Creole. Creole. Just another omen, like the rum and the rain, we chose to overlook…

For the novice sailor, stepping aboard a boat tied into her slip is similar to walking a circus tightrope. Raucous laughter and applause accompanied me as I grabbed the halyard (more nautical language) and teetered across the mooring line. The deck seemed pretty cramped with six of us crawling and clinging to the sopping wet sides. I retired below in the hopes of carefully stowing stores…

More tomorrow.