American gnostic?
Sugarloaf Key, FL The TV is out tonight. The set went black about halfway through "Miami Vice," just as Don Johnson dropped KGB thug with a single 200-yard shot from his high-tech jelly gun.
The storm got serious after that, and the mood in The Keys turned mean. Junk cars crashed in the mango swamps and fishheads whipped on each other with sharkhooks in all-night bars and roadhouses along Highway A1A. These people will tolerate almost anything except being cut off in the middle of "Miami Vice."
On nights like these it is better not to answer the telephone. It can only mean trouble: Some friend has been crushed on the highway by a falling power pole, or it might be the Coast Guard calling to say that your boat was stolen by dope fiends who just called on the radio to say they are sinking somewhere off Sand Key and they've given you as their local credit reference, to pay for the rescue operation.
In my case, it was a just-reported shipwreck involving total strangers. An 88-foot tramp motor-sailor called The Tampa Bay Queen had gone on the reef in Hawk Channel, and all hands had abandoned ship.
There were only three of them, as it turned out. They had all washed ashore on an ice chest, raving incoherently about green sharks and coral heads and their ship breaking up like a matchbox while they screamed for help on a dead radio.
"Why not?" I thought. We are, after all, in The Business—and besides, I had never covered a shipwreck, not even a small one ... and there was also talk about "losing the cargo" and the cruel imperatives of "salvage rights."
None of this talk seemed worth going out in a storm to investigate at the time, but that is not how The Business works. I went out, and not long after midnight found myself huddled with these people in a local motel where they'd been given shelter for the night ... and by dawn I was so deep in the story that I'd hired a 36-foot Cigarette boat to take me and the captain out to his doomed wreck, at first light, so he could recover what was left of it.
"We'll have to move quick," he said, "before the cannibals get there. They'll strip her naked by noon."
The sun came up hot and bright that morning. The storm was over and the chop in the channel was down to 3 feet, which means nothing to a fast Cigarette boat. We were running 40 mph by the time we got out of the bay, and about 40 minutes later we were tying up to the wreck of The Tampa Bay Queen. It was lying on the bottom, tilted over at a 45-degree angle, and the sea had already broken it open.
There was no hope of saving anything except the new nylon sails and the V-8 engine and six nickel-plated brass winches, which the distraught captain said were worth $5,000 each—and maybe the 80-foot teakwood mast, which would fetch about $100 a foot in Key West, and looked like a thing of beauty.
We climbed up the steep rotted deck and the captain set about slashing down the sails with a butcher knife and ordering the first mate to take a hatchet to the winches. "Never mind a screwdriver," he shouted. "Just rip 'em out by the stumps."The first mate was in no mood to take orders. He had not been paid in three weeks, he said, and he was wearing fancy black leather pilot's boots with elevator heels and slick leather soles, which caused him to constantly lose his footing and go sliding down the deck. We would hear him scream as he went off, and then there would be a splash. I spent most of my time pulling him back up the deck, and finally we lashed him to the mast with a steel safety cable, which allowed him to tend to his work.
By this time I had worked up a serious sweat, and the mystique of this filthy shipwreck had long since worn off. The captain was clearly a swine and the first mate was a middle-aged bellboy from New Jersey and the ship was probably stolen ... But here I was out on the high sea with these people, doing manual labor in the morning and bleeding from every knuckle. It was time, I felt, for a beer.
I was moving crabwise along the deck, homing in on the cooler we'd left in the Cigarette boat, when I saw the scavengers coming in. They had been circling the wreck for a while, two half-naked thugs in a small skiff, and the captain had recognized them instantly.
"God help us now," he muttered "Here they come. These are the ones I was worried about." He looked nervously out at the two burly brutes in the cannibal boat, and he said he could see in their eyes that they were getting ready to board us and claim the whole wreck for themselves.
It won't be much longer," he said. "These bastards are worse than pirates. We may have to fight for it."
I shrugged and moved off toward the beer cooler, at the other end of the wreck. The captain was obviously crazy, and I had lost my feel for The Story. All I wanted was a cold can of beer.
By the time I got to the Cigarette boat, however, the thugs had made their move and were tying up alongside us, grinning like wolves as they crouched between me and the cooler. I stared down at them and swore never again to answer my phone after midnight.
"Was this your boat?" one of them asked. "We heard you whimpering all night on the radio. It was a shame."
The next few minutes were tense, and by the end of that time I had two new partners and my own marine salvage business. The terms of the deal were not complex, and the spirit was deeply humane.
The captain refused to cooperate at first, screeching hoarsely from the other end of the wreck that he had silent partners in Tampa who would soon come back and kill all of us...
But you hear a lot of talk like that in The Keys, so we ignored him and drank all the beer and hammered out a three-way agreement that would give the captain until sundown to take anything he wanted, and after that the wreck would be ours.
It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.
The captain seemed to understand, and so did I. He would be lucky to get back to shore with anything at all, and I had come close to getting my throat slit.
It was almost dark when we dropped him off on the dock, where he quickly sold out to a Cuban for $5,000 in cash. Mother ocean had prevailed once again, and I was now in the marine salvage business.
Guest blogger: Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
California Creaming
Gone skatin'.
Broken lines, broken strings, | Broken threads, broken springs, | Broken idols, broken heads, | People sleeping in broken beds. | Ain't no use jiving | Ain't no use joking | Everything is broken.
In as much as bad things happen in threes, so do good things. I have a month's leave (and South Africa's Western Cape gets more sun than California). I've had a wonderful Christmas, and I've been tearing up the tarmac on my good ol' 46" Sector 9 long board. That's kinda where it ends. This morning, having ridden the monster for an hour-and-a-half, and while taking one last, long, slow downhill nearby, carving the road to tarred Champagne, the back wheels slid out on a front turn and I went straight to ground, awkwardly, on the inside of my wrist. Despite Bob's dour outlook, it's probably not broken—having been there and done that, I'm pretty sure of it—but the discomfort is such that I'm typing this wearing a wrist guard. The wrist and thumb are bloody painful and seem intent on staying that way a while. A man should swap boards (skate for key) on long, sunny days like today. Potentially more debilitating, skating's somehow far healthier than keyboarding. Tomorrow, though, and although the weather looks set to be as good as it was today, it appears boards of any type will be out of the question.
Umm... ya' know of any good pain killers?
Seem like every time you stop and turn around | Something else just hit the ground.
Bob Dylan | Everything is Broken
