CHAPTER 4 #2
“Same place. He couldn’t care less where he was sleeping as long as he had a good bed and a washer and dryer.
Laundry mattered to him. Other than sleeping and laundry, he might as well have lived on the boat.
The boat was a lot of the reason I didn’t go see him more.
He always wanted to go out on the boat, but the smell of the fish and the smell of the diesel exhaust and then whatever chop there was in the water always did a number on me. ”
“I can see how chemo would be preferable to that.”
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“Me? I’m fine.”
I nodded. “Buddy, too. Buddy was always fine. He had people lining up to take him to chemo, his brothers and his brothers’ wives and my cousins and other fishermen and the waitress in the diner where he had breakfast every morning. The fact that he asked me to go with him meant a lot.”
“Everyone was in love with Buddy Zabriskie,” Eddie said.
“The nurses,” I said. “Oh my god, the nurses came over to check his line every two minutes. As soon as Buddy came in, they were all putting on lipstick. Who tries to pick up a guy with a port? It really was a sight to behold. All my life I’d thought of my father as an obligation that I wasn’t attending to.
I felt guilty about not seeing him more.
Come to find out my father was doing fine. ”
“What was it he had?”
“Metastatic melanoma, same as Candy Fuller.”
“Oh, that’s right. You told me that.”
“He’d already had a melanoma taken out of his ankle. It looked like he’d been bitten by a small shark. He was fine for about three years and then he started coughing. The cancer had spread to his lungs, his pelvis.”
Eddie shook his head. “How old was he?”
“When he died? Fifty-four.”
Eddie and I looked at each other. “How had I not thought of that?” I said. I was fifty-four.
“If you searched ‘picture of health’ on the internet right now, I bet you’d still get a picture of Buddy Zabriskie. He was the man least likely to die young.”
“It’s funny, but when I was growing up, he used to tell me there was nothing healthier than working on a boat.
He said your body stayed strong because you used all your muscles pulling in the nets and stocking the ice, and your brain stayed sharp solving problems because something you’d never thought of before was always going wrong with the engine or the nets or the fish.
You had to be fast, use tools, have good balance on the slippery deck.
He said fishermen always had friends, both the immediate family of your own boat but also the other people on other boats.
Everyone helped each other out and would go looking for you if your boat didn’t come back.
They all met up for a beer at the end of the day to tell their fish stories and the socialization was good for you and the beer was good for you.
You stayed outside in all kinds of weather so you built up your immune system.
And on top of that there were long stretches of nothingness spent staring out at the beautiful ocean, seeing dolphins and porpoises, maybe a whale, and that gave you a sense of wonder and maybe peace.
I grew up thinking my father, who I pretty much never saw, lived some magical existence, and then one day I realized that fishing was hard, dangerous work and he was telling me a story so I wouldn’t worry about him drowning. ”
The nurse came in to check the bag. “Still good?”
“I get to see you,” Eddie said. “I get to see her. What’s not to love?”
“Your friend has an excellent temperament,” the nurse said to me.
“My father,” I said. Buddy wouldn’t have minded that; Buddy, who was always happy to share.
She looked at us, one and then the other.
“Genetics are a mystery,” Eddie said.
The nurse nodded. “Do you want anything to drink? Coke? Ginger ale?”
“All good,” Eddie said. He waited until she was down the hall. “Did he die in the hospital? I hate the thought of dying in a hospital.”
“You’re not going to die,” I said.
Eddie laughed. “I hate to break this to you.”
I corrected myself. “You’re not going to die anytime soon.
You’re not going to die in a hospital.” What was it about death that made people lie this way?
I had no idea how or when or where Eddie would die; I only knew I couldn’t stand the thought of it.
Like Buddy, I hoped that telling a story would make the story so.
“Buddy,” Eddie said, steering the conversation back.
I looked out the window. We were high enough up to see the East River, and yet the East River had disappeared beneath the low-hanging clouds.
“He said he’d become an old boat. There’s a leak in the starboard, and while you’re plugging it up, a leak springs up in the aft, and you plug it, but then there’s water seeping up between the boards of the deck and you don’t know where it’s coming from, but the starboard leak is going again and then you’re not trying to plug anything, you’re bailing, and the pump chokes. ”
“I get the picture.”
“Later on they’d found a melanoma in his brain, a small one but still, bad news. Then he got pneumonia from the chemo. His lungs were shot anyway. They had to put him back in the hospital then.”
“So he did die in the hospital.”
I shook my head. “Don’t get ahead of me. This is when Jonathan Fuller arrives. Well, we’d already met him a few times before that. The hospital in Gloucester was small. There were plenty of opportunities to run into the friendly administrator.”
“You must have looked like springtime to Jonathan, like wildflowers in a glass.”
I shrugged. “Hard to remember. Did we ever look like springtime?”
“Yes,” Eddie said in his great dental chair. “Both of us.”
I liked the thought of this—both of us—because I had known Eddie in his springtime, when he was beautiful.
I went back to my story. “Once Buddy had pneumonia, once he was very sick, Jonathan came a lot. Buddy’s room was always full of family, my grandparents, my uncles, my cousins, all the fishermen in and out.
As far as anyone could tell, Buddy had been happy with his life and had two regrets: he was sorry that he’d never been on an airplane, and he was sorry he’d never seen the Pacific Ocean. ”
“Buddy had never been on a plane?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t know it either.
I guess the work on the boat never stopped and the money he made went back into the boat, so he didn’t go anywhere.
If he took a vacation, he went to the Cape or he went to Maine and worked on other people’s boats for a week.
He once drove his mother to New York because she wanted to see Jesus Christ Superstar. ”
“You’re making that up.”
“It was the seventies. Anyway, that was Buddy’s one trip to Manhattan and he’d be the first to tell you that it was not for him.
But he was sorry that he never saw the Pacific.
He had wanted to go to Big Sur. That was his dream.
He’d seen pictures, and he liked the name.
So one day there were too many people in the room and I went to sit in the hall and here came the hospital administrator I would later marry, and I started talking to him.
Did he think Buddy could make it out to California? ”
A stricken look passed over Eddie. “Did he die in California?”
“Stop,” I said. “Seriously, listen. Jonathan said he thought Buddy could make it. He said I should wait until he was stronger, but he thought it would work. He said as long as I got a nonstop flight, I should be okay, which was good advice. I bought two first-class tickets, Boston to San Francisco.”
“First class?”
“You remember how tall Buddy was, and he had a lot of pain in his back. I couldn’t fold him up in coach for such a long flight.
I had no idea how expensive it was going to be.
Then there was the rental car, the hotels, all of it on the credit card.
My grandparents and my uncles wanted to kick in, the fishermen wanted to kick in, but nobody had any money.
Thanks to the Power of Positivity, I’d made it through college without student loans, and everyone I knew had student loans.
This would be my debt. Buddy and I were having a good time being together and I wanted to do that for him. ”
“So how was the trip?”
For two people who had spent their lives looking at the Atlantic Ocean, it was like nothing we had ever seen—cliffs and rocks and the crashing sea. “Beautiful,” I said. “Have you ever been?”
Eddie nodded. “A long time ago. I went to some legal convention in San Francisco with Skip, a full-blown holiday. We rented a convertible and drove to Monterey, Big Sur. I’m glad Buddy got to see it.”
I did not let my story be derailed by the thought of Eddie and Skip driving down Highway 1 in a convertible.
I only regretted that I hadn’t thought to rent one myself.
“The trip exhausted him, but he was so happy. They loaded him up on steroids and antibiotics before we left. Sometimes he would walk a little ways, but mostly we stayed in the car. There were places you could park and the view was unbelievable. One day we were right there looking out at Big Sur and he told me he’d always thought he would drown.
He said it was hardly an original idea, fishermen always think they’re going to drown.
You know people who drown, and you hear the stories about the ones you didn’t know, and on top of that you’re looking at water all day.
He said it wasn’t that he wanted to drown, but he felt like he’d spent his whole life planning for the wrong thing. ”
“Did you ever have a premonition about how you were going to die?” Eddie asked.
“Me?”
“The only other person in the room,” he said.
“Car accident.” I had never said that before to anyone.
He nodded. “Exactly. All my life I was sure I was going to die in a car accident. It’s like we beat the devil once, so it must be coming back around for us later.”