The Dakota Winters, page 18
There was more to it, I knew, but there was something amazing about charting your course by staring at the sky, as though we were taking directions from the gods above.
We listened to songs on the radio, and when we lost reception, on a tape player Declan brought. I was amazed at how little John knew about the bands on the radio, like Blondie, the Jam, the Police, Talking Heads. He liked Madness and he liked the Jam. He liked the Specials.
John wrote in a journal and on blank pages drew scenes from the boat. He threw in some dolphins and an occasional shark.
We managed for a while to tune in to the BBC, and on one of the reports I heard a familiar voice reporting about a member of the Weathermen turning herself in for a bombing a decade ago. The voice signed off, “This is Olive Diop reporting for the BBC.”
THAT SECOND NIGHT WHEN DARK RAINED DOWN THE STARS WERE CRAZY. “It’s a Van Gogh sky,” John said (he pronounced it “Van Gog,” for some reason). If you looked closely, Declan said, you could see Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn. The moon lit the tips of the waves. I took the early night shift with Tyler, then at around one A.M. John and Hank took our place. I stayed up another hour with the two of them and listened to them talk about John’s time in India and Hank’s work at a drug clinic. Declan came out as well to bum a Gitane cigarette from John.
He told Hank about his father leaving home when he was two on a boat.
“What kind of boat?”
“He was a merchant seaman.”
“That was a serious job in World War II.”
“He was a bastard.”
“He must have had some great stories.”
“If he did I never heard ’em. He got into trouble in New York. And he spent a week in an Algerian prison. The Lennon bloodline. Without our women we get into trouble.”
“Didn’t Ringo’s father run off too?” Declan said.
“When he was three. He grew up with his mum in a house with no hot water and no toilet. They used an unheated shed with a hole in the ground. There’s a story for you. And at six he nearly died.”
“Of what?”
“Burst appendix. Poor sod had to be rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. They fixed him up and then he fell into a coma. For weeks he was in and out of consciousness. At school the kids called him Lazarus . . . for coming back from the dead.”
“It’s like something out of Dickens,” I said.
“It got worse. A few years later he came down with TB and they quarantined him in a hospital ward with other infected boys. For two years, which is when he learned the drums. They had a band on the ward.”
“A tubercular band!”
“Yes, and little Richey Starkey was the drummer. He’d bang his drums on the cabinet next to him. They had a music teacher who worked with them.”
“Hard to sell tickets for that show,” Declan said.
“They’d always cough up a good song or two,” John deadpanned.
“Did you know that Joni Mitchell and Neil Young both had polio?” Declan asked. “They got it in the same epidemic and that’s when Joni started singing. She sang Christmas carols in her hospital ward.”
“Why was he called Ringo?” Tyler asked.
“Rings. On his fingers. Lots of them. Rory Storm came up with it.”
“Who’s that?”
“Leader of the band we stole Ringo from, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Played the clubs in Hamburg the same time as us. They weren’t any good, except Ringo. He’d sit in the back of our shows yelling shite at us. Fuckin’ hooligan.”
“But you already had a drummer.”
“We did. One time Pete was out for some reason and Ringo sat in with us, and we thought, Oh dear.”
“Adios, Pete,” Declan said.
“It was a whole new level. We saw what we could be.”
“You ever miss those days?”
“Hamburg? Sure. Touring in the big stadiums, never. Because as crazy as it was in Hamburg it was still small, still manageable. It wasn’t mobs in the Philippines trying to yank you out of a car and beat you to a bloody pulp.”
I was getting tired, and very stoned. I thought I saw jellyfish in the water around us. There was something phosphorescent in the water. I was picturing Ringo yelling things at John and Paul from the back of a club, and what it would have been like to be there.
At some point Hank asked him about his time with the maharishi, when they left the crush of fame for Rishikesh.
“Our little guru, tiny little voice,” John said. “‘Meditation takes you to a place of bliiisss’”—he used the maharishi’s high-pitched voice—“‘a peace beyond understanding.’ He had that little giggle.”
“Didn’t he fuck around with some of the women?”
“He was Sexy Sadie,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Originally,” John said, “it went something like, ‘Maharishi, you little twat, who the fuck do you think you are, you little cunt.’”
“I guess you couldn’t go with that.”
“No. Too bad. And we learned a lot from him in the end.”
There’d been a card game earlier and John had lost. Declan suggested an alternative to paying off his bet.
“What’s that?”
“Inside information.”
“What sort?”
“Well, while we’re in India, where did ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’ come from?” Declan said. “It’s heroin, right? I need a fix. Or else it’s sex. Bang, bang, shoot, shoot.”
“It’s a masterpiece for the ages,” Hank said.
“Is it interview the ex-Beatle time? If so I’ll take the dinghy back to Newport.”
“Not at all,” Declan said. “We just need you to clear up some differences of opinion.”
“Feck off,” John said and sort of smiled.
“Six songs and I promise to shut my mouth.”
“Get that in writing,” Tyler said.
“An article I saw in a gun magazine,” John offered. “I thought it was crazy. Guns are warm when you’ve just shot someone.”
“‘I’m So Tired,’” I asked, in part because my eyes felt heavy.
“I couldn’t sleep in India and came up with it. I like that one.”
“‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road,’” Hank asked.
“Paul saw some monkeys fucking in the road once.”
“The piano intro to ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,’” Hank asked.
“That’s two, but since you’re the captain . . . I wrote it drunk and pissed off at Paul. He’d commandeered every bloody note and phrase on the whole song. So I went out, got myself stoned, and I walked back in and said, ‘Now this is how the fucking song should go.’ I told you, Anton, Paul was Captain Bligh.”
This went on for a while, this improbably perfect night out at sea with John and Hank and the rest. Eventually, Hank told me to get some sleep because I was on watch in six hours and I’d need to be alert.
“The song ‘Good Night’?” I asked then.
“That one’s for Julian. I gave it to Ringo to sing.”
“My father used to sing ‘Good Night’ to Kip before he went to sleep,” I said.
“Without the weepy string section I hope.”
I heard Elliot’s voice in my ear saying, “Ask him. Ask him for fuck’s sake.”
But I couldn’t risk messing up the beautiful mood, and so I slipped down into the cabin, crawled into my sleeping bag, and went to sleep.
ON THE THIRD MORNING A POD OF DOLPHINS APPEARED DURING BREAKFAST, what looked like a hundred of them diving this way and that, from under the boat and all around us, as though they’d been booked for our early day enjoyment. It’s a dazzling thing to see them, so fast, and beautiful, playful, and smart from what I’d read.
Before lunch we dropped anchor and swam off the side of the boat for a while. I borrowed the captain’s mask and fins. I saw a barracuda and a lot of jellyfish. The radio, when I pulled myself out of the sea, played James Brown singing “Get Up Offa That Thing.”
I took the late afternoon watch and, with the sun on my face and the warm breeze in my hair, felt a deep sense of contentment. I understood how someone could want to sail across the oceans, to spend months at sea, and I thought I could imagine why someone like Sir Francis Chichester might choose to do it alone. There’s a rhythm to life at sea, and it doesn’t sweep you up right away, but there was something about sluicing through the ocean waves with only the wind for power, and with the sun and moon as your guides, that felt right, like something every human being needed to do. I saw too what John had wanted from this, because without knowing it, it was what I’d wanted and needed.
Whatever you hoped for from meditation or drugs, the ego-demolishing escape could be had out at sea, because whoever you were before was gone out here. You could see in the distance the curve of the planet. It looked like we were in the middle of a fountain and the water was pouring over the sides.
Everything was better at sea, I thought in that moment, the food, the conversation, the beer, the weed, the air, the smells, the sleeping at night with the sound of the waves all around.
And now we moved on toward the Gulf Stream, and toward a tiny speck in the sea they called Bermuda, and the ’Mudian girls that John spoke of like plump Tahitian beauties. We would each of us find at least one of them to accompany us to the beach and back to their thatched-roof home, where they would feed us and lay with us, and take us in the morning to their favorite private lagoon where tropical birds would serenade us and where coconuts would fall nearby, and we’d crack them open and drink the cool milk straight from the shell.
When John was out of earshot, taking a piss I think, the captain said to me, “You realize who this is. This man is a satellite, he’s a blessing, he’s literally touched a hundred million lives. He’s a certified genius. And he’s spent those years hiding away. And now he’s free of all that and you can see it. And we’re blessed to be with him on this journey. This is the trip of your life, of my life.” I thought a little unfairly of my father’s voyages, and how significant it was that John had brought me out here and Buddy had left us all behind.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, AFTER MY WATCH CONCLUDED UNEVENTFULLY, the winds picked up and then off in the distance you could see a front coming in, the clouds blackening, the sunlight dimming, and it was at first beautiful and dramatic, and a small part of you thought, This could be tricky.
And when I looked over at Captain Hank’s face, I understood that we were in trouble. To be sure he was calm, but he stopped joking around and after a lot of serious watching, he began to bark instructions.
“Get your gear on,” Hank said. Tyler put on his rain gear and sea boots. John did as well. My job, Hank said, was to go below and help Declan clear the surfaces, tie things down, double-check the ports, and make sure everything was secure.
“Aw geez. You feel that?” Tyler said.
It was the wind, and you could hear it now whistling through.
“I hate that sound,” Tyler said.
“Why?”
“Because it’ll really start ripping in a minute or two.”
Then the sound was all around us. The sail flapping. The waves pounding the boat, the spray hitting our faces.
“Here we go,” John said. “Up the masthead, Mr. Byam,” he said to me.
I don’t think he realized what this was any more than I did.
The sky went gray above us, soon to be black, and I thought of The Wizard of Oz when the twister swirls toward Dorothy.
Tyler looked out and said, “This looks bad.” Just that.
THE FIRST PART OF YOU THAT WAKES UP IN A STORM, HANK WOULD SAY later, is your ears. You hear the high pitch of the wind, and the slap of the sails, then the creaking of the masthead and of the boat itself, moan, crack, and the rat-a-tat-tat of the rain. Then there’s the ping-ping sound of the wind through the rigging. And the rip of ropes sliding, and the creak of boards bending, and the violent music of the sea itself. And then your eyes brace for the sting of salt, and the sight of a sail tearing, or falling, and of the waves rising behind you to worrisome heights.
Down below Declan was locked in the lavatory puking. The floor of the Megan Jaye tilted and things flew around. A bottle of red wine slid from the counter onto the floor and splattered the walls and some nearby cushions. While I cleared up pieces of glass, a drawer swung open, and plates and cups flew out along with a knife that dropped an inch from my foot.
I did my best to mop it all up, but the sound of Declan blowing chow destroyed my own equilibrium, and soon I was equally sick. And I went back up to get some air and to see how high the waves had gotten. Hank was at the wheel. John and Tyler were following his commands.
I looked behind the boat and saw a wave the size of a brownstone barreling toward us, poised to drown us all, and then it grabbed the boat and hoisted us to the heavens, and then dropped us on the other side. I willed myself to feel better, to not succumb to seasickness, to be strong and earn my stripes, but I was too far gone and threw up violently off the side of the boat and nearly fell in.
The storm raged all that day and into the night. Those who were seasick hung below, and those who weren’t took turns battling the beast. Hank and Tyler took a watch, then John and Hank, then Tyler and John. Then Tyler got sick and joined us below and John came down after that to take a nap.
At some point the anchor had broken loose and was banging at the end of a chain in the bow of the boat. I wanted to go secure it, and do something heroic, but Hank went down there himself, crawling along the deck, the ocean crashing over him, at one point submerging the back of the boat. I watched him, and I saw him disappear for a bit, and we knew in that instant we would die, because no one could do what he could in a storm, and then we saw his head rise up, and he finished the job, tied the anchor down again, and slid back up our way.
“Piece of cake,” he said.
“You’re a god,” John said. “The Zig-Zag god.”
THERE’S NO WAY TO ESCAPE A STORM AT SEA; IT HITS YOU, AND YOU can’t hit back. You dodge the blows, then burrow into the belly. Tyler likened it to driving a bumpy road with eyes closed and knowing you’ll hit a tree, or fall down an incline, but not knowing exactly when. I crawled into my damp sleeping bag and tried to sleep, and I even did for a while, maybe two hours, but then I woke, or half woke, and I was in my hospital bed in Gabon, sick with malaria, my head feverish, my dreams crazy, the room around me spinning, and then rocking, like a boat. And I thought it was so strange that a hospital room . . . was I now at the hospital? . . . was I still in Africa? And why was this hospital room rocking up and down like a cabin on a boat, and why were there waves outside, and the sounds of wind? It must be that a storm had hit in Africa, around my hospital room, but I was waterlogged, my brow sweaty, and tasting of salt. And then I closed my eyes and went somewhere warm. On a beach. Far away. And I must have slept for a while. When I woke again I felt sick. I went over to the sink and splashed water over my face. I wasn’t hungry, but I felt very weak, and extremely seasick. Had I taken Dramamine? I was pretty sure I had, but I searched for my bottle and found one and ate it.
I got to my feet. Put my jacket on and stumbled up the steps and out into the wind and spray and the awful sound of everything flapping and creaking, that sound that makes you certain that the whole boat will soon split apart and we’ll all be shark food, that makes you picture the shark in Jaws taking your body up to the stomach, and maybe you’d survive that way. As a stomach, a chest, two arms, shoulders, a neck, and a head. I’d seen Vietnam vets without their lower body, I think, though mostly they just had stumps for legs.
Hank was at the helm. He looked calm. He was with John, and they looked like a matched pair, like lifelong friends, and I wished that I hadn’t been so useless, that I’d been out there with them. The sky was black now from horizon to horizon.
“Did you get anything on the radio?”
“Nothing’s coming in. I got a report an hour ago about a storm, but we didn’t need a report on that.”
“How long will it last?”
“A day. Two. Three?”
“How long will we last is the question,” John said.
“A lifetime,” Hank said. “We’ll beat this.”
THE WAVES IN THE GULF STREAM ARISE HEEDLESSLY AND HAVEN’T TRAVELED far over the ocean, which means the wave periods are shorter and the waves are closer together, and this is what’s so different about them, it’s that as your bow comes off one wave the trough is so small the bow has no time to start climbing the next wave, which is on you too soon, and it’s bigger than the last, and it can knock you broadside, and then you’re fucked.
Hank calls this state of things confusion. “You have this seven-hundred-mile tract of ocean and you run a river of eighty degree water through it, the waves get confused. And there’s nothing more dangerous,” he said, “than a confused wave.”
The hope in a storm is that you keep climbing them with the bow and dropping on the other side and you never let the wave crash over the back of the boat.
Hours vanished, then a whole day. Was it Tuesday or Friday? The wind kept howling. Eating was a problem. We were sick, but you couldn’t go days without eating or drinking. It was hard to keep the kettle on long enough for the water to boil, and once the water boiled, you couldn’t pour it into cups without scalding yourself. Everything was impossible.
And I felt sicker and sicker. In my dreamy state, I imagined the ghosts of all the lost ships, and the lost planes, beneath us, awaiting our arrival. We would add to the legend. I imagined my parents hearing about it and finding out through a news report that I was on the boat. I’d be an afterthought at best. I had this crazy dream where I jumped off a building and then halfway down I realized I didn’t want to die, and so I started to reach out for the ledges, and it’s like in a cartoon, my hand grabbed and slipped, grabbed and slipped, then I did a flip, and my head hit a series of ledges. This went on for a while and then finally there was a window open and I managed to fall into it, and when I did it was a surprise party for me and everyone was waiting for me inside, like it was all planned. And in the dream I wondered how they would know, in that I had planned to die, and I asked my mother and she said, We knew you’d come back, and then I was eating cake and blowing out the candles and I made a wish, and my wish was that I never wake up, that I can live in this dreamworld where everyone’s waiting inside for me, and that whatever I do there’s a window open for me to fall back through.
